Academic Publications

Inter‐platform ecosystems

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
We extend ecosystem theory to cases in which platforms are complementors to each other: inter‐platform ecosystems. Analyzing web traffic data on 241 European platforms, we identify and characterize demand‐side inter‐platform ecosystems, and propose a theory of why they emerge. We posit that demand‐side inter‐platform ecosystems solve matching problems generated by externalities platforms impose on each other. We describe four strategies platforms implement to solve these problems: network fusion (hosting competitor content), user‐community‐driven interactions (facilitating cross‐posting), meta‐platform (aggregating another platform), and platform concatenation (referring users to another platform for customized complementary services). We link these strategies to the nature of the externalities, the types of platforms involved and their competitive relationship. We conclude with implications for theory and suggestions for further research.Managerial SummaryPlatforms increasingly act as complementors to each other, creating “inter‐platform ecosystems” to boost cross‐platform interactions and reduce search costs. Using web traffic data on 241 European platforms, we identify four strategies they use to that end: network fusion (hosting competitor content), user‐community‐driven interactions (facilitating cross‐posting), meta‐platform (aggregating another platform), and platform concatenation (referring users to another platform for customized complementary services). These strategies pose three main management challenges. First, because no single platform necessarily orchestrates the ecosystem, platforms must navigate complex multi‐party coordination through bilateral agreements. Second, platforms face coopetition tensions: cooperating multiplies interactions but increases disintermediation risk. Third, pricing structures must account for cross‐platform interdependencies, where a platform's value depends on how its users interact with other platforms’.

Unlocking novel knowledge recombinations: The effect of artificial intelligence on inventive activity

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
Complementing the role of AI in facilitating search and identifying combinations of high value in inventive activity, we argue that AI fundamentally alters the innovation landscape by unlocking new combinations that were previously infeasible. This effect arises because AI acts as a powerful shared layer due to its predictive capabilities and its ability to transmit solutions across domains, thereby creating a bridge between previously unconnected elements. Utilizing a matched sample of patents, we show that inventions incorporating AI exhibit a greater degree of novel recombinations compared to those without AI, and that our proposed bridging mechanism is consistent with these novel recombinations. Our study contributes by identifying a new mechanism by which recombinations emerge in inventive activity while also highlighting the role of enabling technologies such as AI in facilitating such recombinations.Managerial SummaryHow does AI impact inventive activity? We examine the question by studying the patenting activity of US firms over the period 2005–2023. We argue that AI fundamentally alters the innovation landscape by unlocking new combinations that were previously infeasible. This effect arises because AI acts as a powerful shared layer due to its predictive capabilities and its ability to transmit shared solutions, thereby creating a bridge between previously unconnected technological elements. Our analysis demonstrates that inventions that build on AI involve novel recombinations to a greater degree compared to inventions that don’t, and that AI bridges and connects knowledge domains that were hitherto disparate. These findings indicate that AI is more than just an invention of a new method of invention, and that it fundamentally reshapes the nature of inventive activity.

Should Monetary Policy Care about Redistribution? Optimal Monetary and Fiscal Policy with Heterogeneous Agents

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Economic Studies
We present a method to determine optimal monetary policy in heterogeneous-agent economies with nominal frictions and aggregate shocks, under various assumptions regarding fiscal policy. We analyze models with either sticky prices or sticky wages. In the sticky-price economy, when fiscal policy is optimally set, optimal monetary policy implements price stability. Inflation volatility remains low when fiscal policy follows empirically relevant rules. The inflation response is more pronounced when the Phillips curve is steep and profits are skewed toward highly productive agents. In the sticky-wage economy, optimal price inflation becomes significantly more volatile, while wage inflation remains small. Under both types of nominal rigidity, agents with lower productivity tend to benefit more from optimal monetary policy.

Information Design in Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) Marketplaces: The Roles of Anonymity and Product Quality Uncertainty

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
Recently, there has been a notable increase in the prevalence of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) online marketplaces offering integration with social networks. Platforms such as eBay, Facebook Marketplace, Zhuanzhuan, and Poshmark have led such initiatives. In such marketplaces, the structure of social relationships revealed to platform participants can influence the choice of transacting partners as well as the terms of transactions. We study the role of different levels of information design policies on offers and acceptance decisions in a social commerce marketplace setting. We propose a novel information design policy, for C2C marketplaces, calledpartial anonymityin which the transacting parties are provided with limited social information about each other. Using a theoretical model and experimental data, we show that a partial-anonymity information design allows sellers to be more strategic than a social commerce marketplace with no anonymity. Further, with a partial-anonymity design, the likelihood of a successful transaction is higher than in a fully anonymous marketplace. Our results are robust to different product categories and uncertainty in product quality.

EXPRESS: The Impact of Ecosystem Shocks on the Operational Performance of Worker-heavy Systems in the Agricultural Domain: The Role of Cognitive Load

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
Temporary economic shocks in local employment ecosystems – events that create temporary alternate employment opportunities for workers – tend to create operational challenges for firms. We investigate two dimensions of these challenges faced by firms that engage workers performing low-skilled tasks in the agricultural industry. We seek to understand (i) which workers leave during these shocks, and (ii) whether workers who choose to stay exhibit any change in their productivity. Both of these answers ultimately determine the resilience of firms during the shocks. We present data from a natural experiment in an agricultural company. The data is for two farms, where workers performed the same task but used two different protocols that differ in cognitive load – the mental effort required to manage and coordinate tasks – at two levels: Higher and Lower. Our findings indicate that, at an aggregate level, shocks in the labor ecosystem increase the strain on farming companies by increasing worker turnover rates. However, during the shock period, the workers who remained with the focal firm demonstrated increased productivity. In the subsequent post hoc analysis, we examine whether worker performance before a shock (as measured by pre-shock productivity) impacts turnover and productivity during shock periods. We find that workers following the lower cognitive load protocol were more likely to leave during the shock if their productivity was low. In contrast, workers following the higher cognitive load protocol were equally likely to leave at all productivity levels. Similarly, for the lower cognitive load protocol, the productivity change during shock was proportional to a worker’s original productivity. In contrast, workers following the higher cognitive load protocol increased their productivity by the same amount across all levels of pre-shock productivity. As such, these findings highlight the differential impacts of cognitive engagement and workload on worker retention and productivity in manufacturing and production settings within a low-skill context. Our findings suggest that work design strategies, especially those that keep workers cognitively engaged at work are crucial for mitigating the negative effects of labor shocks. By recognizing the role of cognitive load in low-skill work, managers can help create more stable teams and more predictable productivity levels, thereby increasing organizational resilience in a volatile labor market.

Consumer-Driven Class Pricing

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Marketing Science
This paper proposes a consumer loss aversion-based rationale for class pricing, which is the practice of assigning only a few price points to many differentiated products.

The Hidden Costs of Fairness in Platform Markets: The Dynamics of Lowering Developer Royalty Rates

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
Multisided platforms crucially rely on indirect network effects. When trying to strengthen these effects, platform owners face a fundamental challenge, namely, designing incentives to enhance developer effort and simultaneously ensuring the release of high-quality products on the platform. This paper highlights the costs associated with lowering royalty rates to boost developer effort, as such reductions increase the relative supply of lower-quality offerings, worsening information congestion problems and amplifying the importance of visibility-enhancing investments. We leverage the quasi random announcements made by Apple and Google, declaring their intention to reduce the royalty rate applied to small app developers from 30% to 15%. We analyze the implications of these reforms using a difference-in-differences approach, finding a substantial increase in small developers’ likelihood of releasing lower-quality and less original apps on iOS and Android after the announcements. These effects are neither paralleled by a comparable increase in high-quality app releases nor by an increase in small developers’ likelihood of launching venture-backed apps. Consistent with worsening information congestion problems because of an influx of low-quality apps, our findings show an increase in the marginal value of experienced user certifications and developers’ app store optimization efforts post announcement. Additionally, we observe that venture capitalists are increasingly concentrating their investments in ventures with higher (observable) quality.This paper was accepted by Anita McGahan, business strategy.Funding: This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education [Project PID2022-138710NB-I00 funded by MCIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE]. A. Conti acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation [Grant 100013_197807].Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.0586 .

EXPRESS: Measuring Heterogeneity in TV Advertising Elasticities: Evidence from 135 Retail and Restaurant Brands

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing Research
We estimate the heterogeneity of TV advertising effectiveness across store characteristics and advertising levels using a large-scale panel of 135 US retail and restaurant brands, and then use these estimates to assess strategies for improving TV advertising performance. We find significant heterogeneity in TV advertising elasticity across characteristics for over 93% of brands, but show that firms’ observed allocations generally fail to fully exploit this estimated heterogeneity and instead covary much more closely with simple heuristics. For example, we find that firms tend to advertise in areas where they already have high revenue, rather than in the areas estimated to have the highest incremental revenue from advertising. In particular, brands tend to overinvest in dense, high-income markets and underinvest in markets with high concentrations of college-educated residents. We project that brands could improve ad lift by a median 2.35 percentage points (relative to <0.5% median baseline ad lift) and earn tens of millions in additional revenue under identical-budget reallocations that better leverage this heterogeneity, and that 14-16 percentage points of brands with negative return-on-investment (ROI) from TV advertising could achieve positive ROI through such reallocations.

EXPRESS: Dual Market Navigation

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing
Dual market navigation refers to consumers’ ongoing engagement across structurally distinct and institutionally separate markets. While prior research has focused on how consumers use service cues to evaluate individual service providers or products, little is known about how consumers use these cues across structurally distinct markets, despite their growing prevalence. We address this gap by extending cue utilization theory to the market level, shifting attention from firm-led, market-expansion strategies to consumer-led, dual-market strategies. Drawing on qualitative data from insured consumers living and routinely shopping for healthcare along the U.S.-Mexico border, we develop the concept ofstrategic cue auditing:the sensemaking process consumers use to evaluate intrinsic and/or extrinsic cue(s) and make comparative assessments of market-level quality cues across different contexts. We identify three cue auditing strategies (reactive, cultural-relational, and cross-comparative) that reveal how consumers make sense of competing market logics when judging service and product quality. These strategies shape healthcare choices and reveal what we conceptualize as cue misfires and misalignments. By theorizing cue utilization as structurally contingent and market-level, this research advances understanding of dual-market navigation beyond healthcare and offers implications for marketers and policymakers operating in contexts including cross-border, online-offline, and formal-informal markets.

EXPRESS: The Making-Up-For-Failure Nudge: Framing Subgoals as Opportunities for Redemption Increases Goal Persistence

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing
Small failures during goal pursuit are inevitable and often derail consumers from reaching their overall goals. This research demonstrates one simple, cost-free nudge: encouraging consumers to make up for small failures. The making-up-for-failure nudge encourages more goal-consistent action today to make up for failing to reach one’s goal yesterday. This leads consumers to perceive the day after a failure as an opportunity to redeem themselves, encoding missing this opportunity astwogoal failures (both the previously failed subgoal and the current subgoal) rather thanone(just the current subgoal). As a result, consumers anticipate feeling worse about missing their opportunity to redeem themselves than failing a subgoal itself. To avoid the heightened negative anticipated emotion of failingnot one, but two, subgoals, consumers are motivated to engage in more goal-consistent behavior after failure. This effect is documented in two longitudinal real-behavior studies, four real-behavior lab studies, and one hypothetical study across various domains (i.e., learning a new language, exercising, and word search games). Three relevant boundary conditions are identified, including 1) how people feel after failure, 2) difficulty/ease of making up for failure, and 3) when people are encouraged to make up for their failure.

EXPRESS: Choosing Larger Portion Sizes for Others

2026-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing
Consumers’ portion size choices are important, as they can influence how much food is eaten and wasted. While previous research has focused on self-selected portion sizes, this research examines portion size choices for others. The authors demonstrate that consumers choose larger portion sizes for others than for themselves, across both healthy and unhealthy foods, and for a wide range of different others. Choosing larger portion sizes for others is problematic, as the authors show that it can contribute to increased food waste. Both process-consistent moderation and mediation show that one driver of choosing larger portion sizes for others is consumers’ desire to view themselves as being caring. Alternative accounts (e.g., predicting that others want to eat more than the self, greater consumption amount uncertainty for others than the self) are addressed. Finally, a process-consistent intervention that reframes the meaning of being caring as mitigating the burden of unwanted leftovers for others decreases portion size choices for others. Altogether, this research offers theoretical contributions to the literatures on food decision-making and choices for others and offers practical contributions by identifying a novel contributor to food waste in social contexts and thus a potential target for interventions aimed at mitigating food waste.

Resource redeployment in multi‐business firms: Centralized or decentralized?

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
Although multi‐business firms can benefit from resource redeployment, we know little about the effects of alternative organizational arrangements on profits. This study examines a critical organizational choice, namely the centralization or decentralization of decision making. A formal model demonstrates that in the presence of business unit agency costs and costs of centralization, the profits from centralization versus decentralization depend not only on business relatedness—as emphasized in prior research—but also on return asymmetries between businesses. Moreover, in contrast with much of the research on contemporaneous resource sharing, the profitability of centralization does not increase monotonically with relatedness. The monotonic relationship holds only when relatedness leads to potential profits from redeployment in the intermediate range. As relatedness increases further, the advantage of centralization may decrease.Managerial SummaryDiversified firms often redeploy resources from one business to another, and the firms must decide whether to centralize or decentralize their redeployment decisions. Much of the literature on related diversification in general, and with respect to redeployment in particular, suggests that related diversification will lead to higher profits when decisions are centralized. However, the analysis presented here shows that centralization may not lead to higher profits from redeployment for highly related diversification, and firms may be able to obtain equivalent or higher profits by decentralizing these decisions.

When does category spanning hurt or help producers?

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
Scholars have theorized many factors shaping whether category spanning helps or hurts producers. We first synthesize evidence by meta‐analyzing 25 years of empirical research, which reveals a null effect of spanning on average, yet with significant subsample heterogeneity. To unpack it, we theorize and find that spanning hurts producers more (i) when spanning occurs within bounded (vs. unbounded) category systems, (ii) when category associations are made by third parties (vs. insiders), (iii) when spanning is located at the product (vs. producer) level, and (iv) when spanning is occurring at once (vs. over time). Two mechanisms underpin these relationships: on the audience side, spanning influences evaluations when it is salient; on the producer side, spanning results in more positive outcomes when producers can control how their spanning behavior is conveyed to audiences. Because these two mechanisms operate jointly, their combined influence can result in spanning having a null, a positive, or a negative net effect. Our study identifies, across 16 theoretical configurations, where these three baseline effects should be expected and clarifies why.Managerial SummaryFirms face a strategic dilemma: should they span across categories or stay focused? Prior studies show mixed results on whether spanning helps or hurts performance. Our findings suggest that outcomes depend on how salient spanning is to audiences and how controllable it is for producers. Spanning tends to hurt performance (i) when the categorization system is bounded (vs. unbounded), (ii) when third parties (vs. insiders) highlight the diversification, (iii) when individual products (vs. producers) span categories, and (iv) when spanning occurs simultaneously (vs. over time). Firms can benefit from spanning, but success depends on managing these four factors to reduce saliency and enhance controllability.

Asset Overhang and Technological Change

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
Investors face reduced incentives to finance technological change that devalues their legacy investments. We formalize this “asset overhang” and apply our framework to the climate-banking nexus. Leveraging (1) firm-level data on green innovation and diffusion and (2) the sets of product and technology market peers, we implement a shift-share design that identifies banks’ credit facilities impacted by green firm activities. We find that green firms imposing an asset overhang across all lenders are 3 to 7 percentage points more likely to report tight credit supply conditions. The presence of legacy-free investors mitigates the asset overhang problem, thereby facilitating technological change.

Gendered Spheres of Learning and Household Decision-Making over Fertility

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Economic Studies
While men and women make joint decisions about fertility, women give birth and are more likely to learn about a significant cost of childbearing—maternal health risk. Within couples in Zambia, men have systematically lower awareness of maternal risk factors and higher desire for children than their wives. We develop a model in which information asymmetries between partners over maternal health risk can persist in equilibrium due to strategic incentives and can generate disagreement over fertility that cannot be resolved with transfers. To study the effect of communication barriers on fertility, we design an experiment that varies whether the husband or the wife receives information about maternal health risk. One year after the intervention, men told about such risk exhibit significant gains in knowledge, report lower demand for children, and communicate this information to their wives, who also update their beliefs. Pregnancy falls significantly, while transfers remain unchanged relative to the control group. Meanwhile, when women are told about risk, they update their beliefs, but fail to transmit the information to their husbands, who do not change their demand for children. While pregnancy also falls among these couples, the decline is accompanied by a significant reduction in transfers and support to the wife. When childbearing costs, particularly those borne by one party, cannot be easily communicated within the household, targeting information can help overcome asymmetries and improve household decision-making.

Gendered Navigation of Advice and Suboptimal Behavior in Matching Algorithms: Evidence from the Residency Match

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Organization Science
Two-sided matching algorithms have been deployed at an increasing rate in labor markets all over the world in part because they can result in more equitable labor market matches. To achieve this desirable result, institutions using these algorithms often engage in a translation process to provide advice to market participants about how to optimally interact with the algorithm. We draw on theories of gendered agency to theorize that men may be more likely than women to engage in independent advice seeking—an agentic way of navigating one’s understanding by seeking out additional advice about how the algorithm works to form their own understanding beyond the baseline advice provided by institutions—and that this tendency leads men to have more success with the algorithm because of their deeper understanding. We test these predictions in the context of the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP), which uses a two-sided matching algorithm to match graduating medical students to residencies in the United States. Using archival data of medical students’ responses in an incentivized simulation of the NRMP and 66 interviews with medical students going through the match, we find evidence supporting these hypotheses. Men are more likely than women to seek additional advice beyond the baseline guidance, improving their understanding and success with the algorithm. These findings advance prior literature by demonstrating that group-based disparities may occur even when the algorithm itself is unbiased because individuals navigate understanding of these novel algorithms in ways shaped by their identities (i.e., gender).Funding: The authors thank UCLA Anderson’s Morrison Center for Marketing and Data Analytics for financial support.Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.19652 .

The Need for Absorptive Capacity Alleviates the Free-Rider Problem in Knowledge Production

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
Knowledge sharing is central to strategy and organizational learning, yet its effect on knowledge production remains underexplored. When knowledge diffuses too easily, individuals may free ride on others’ costly knowledge production, creating a suboptimal equilibrium in which knowledge sharing persists but the average payoff is no greater than if everyone produced knowledge independently—the so-called Rogers’ paradox. We develop a game-theoretic model to re-examine this puzzle. In our baseline model, we reproduce Rogers’ paradox; frictionless sharing does not increase performance beyond individual knowledge production alone. We then extend the model to incorporate absorptive capacity—the need for prior investment in one’s own knowledge before learning from others. Absorptive capacity discourages pure free riding. Counterintuitively, although it introduces frictions in knowledge sharing, absorptive capacity increases collective knowledge production beyond the level attainable through individual knowledge production alone. This explains why extensive knowledge sharing in domains such as academia does not erode incentives for knowledge production. It also contributes to knowledge-based theories of the firm by showing that although hierarchical control may be crucial in contexts where knowledge is simple and codifiable, it may not be necessary where knowledge is complex and tacit. More broadly, our analysis illustrates how formal modeling can uncover overlooked mechanisms and integrate insights across cultural evolution, organizational learning, and strategy.This paper was accepted by Alfonso Gambardella, business strategy.Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.06471 .

Technology Development Outsourcing: When to Join Forces With a Rival?

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Operations Management
Knowing the challenges of collaborating with a competitor in developing new technologies, firms sometimes still choose a competitor instead of a noncompeting technology provider. To explore why, this study adopts an inter‐organizational trust view to explain the formation of a technology development outsourcing relationship. Using a vignette‐based experiment with procurement managers, results show how three product‐ and competitor‐related factors: product newness, competitor market size, and product substitutability, affect a purchasing manager's intention to choose a competitor. The post hoc analysis confirms the two sources of inter‐organizational trust, competence and integrity, in explaining the influences of the three factors. Using results from two waves of interviews, a behavioral experiment and a rational agent math model, this study explains competitor selection behaviors in a triadic context with a noncompeting provider as the default option. Contributing to the interface of technology outsourcing, co‐opetition in innovation, and supplier selection literature, these findings can help managers assess product and competitor attributes in deciding whether to collaborate with a competitor in a technology development outsourcing context.

Stratified consumer activism: How socioeconomic status shapes boycott participation

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Consumer Psychology
Consumer activism is becoming increasingly common worldwide, but are all consumer groups as likely to engage in these practices? The current research investigates the presence of socioeconomic status (SES) differences in boycotting participation and explores the psychological processes underlying potential discrepancies. Results from four studies, including cross‐national surveys, experiments, and lab‐in‐the‐field evidence, show that low‐SES consumers display a lower likelihood of boycotting companies than their high‐SES peers. The phenomenon emerges across different measures, including self‐reported intentions, past actions, and actual behaviors. This reduced inclination to boycott among the socioeconomically disadvantaged is driven by their reduced sense of control, which induces lower beliefs that consumption can be used as an effective instrument to enact change. These findings offer important contributions to the study of boycotting practices and shed new light on the complex relationship between socioeconomic conditions and consumer behavior.

Beyond Truthful Reporting: Robust Strategies for Worst-Case Payoff Maximization in Large Markets

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Information Systems Research
In many large-scale markets mediated by digital platforms, such as advertising, energy trading, transportation logistics, and spectrum auctions, platforms suggest that participants report true valuations to simplify strategic complexity. This recommendation is widely followed by smaller bidders who lack resources for sophisticated strategic analysis. This paper shows that simple deviations from truthful reporting can improve outcomes for such participants. Using a robust optimization framework, we derive practical bidding strategies for generalized first-price, generalized second-price, and core-selecting combinatorial auctions. Our distribution-free approach maximizes worst-case payoffs over a set of plausible competitor bids, without requiring detailed information about rival behavior. We demonstrate that simple strategies, specifically shading bids on preferred bundles, consistently outperform truthful bidding when bidders have straightforward valuation structures. This insight persists even in complex settings where closed-form optimal policies cannot be derived. The results provide actionable guidance for market participants with limited information who lack resources for deploying sophisticated bidding algorithms, while offering market designers insight into how participants might deviate from recommended strategies.

Balancing Acts: Unveiling the Dynamics of Post Removal on Social Media User-Generated Content

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Information Systems Research
Policy and Practice AbstractUser-generated content (UGC) is central to engagement and value creation on social media platforms, but policy violations and low-quality posts create significant reputational, legal, and financial risks. Platforms commonly respond by removing posts that violate community standards, yet it remains unclear whether such actions deter users from contributing or instead improve subsequent behavior. Analyzing data from 40 Reddit communities using a difference-in-differences design, we examine how post removal influences users’ future contributions. We find that removing a user’s post reduces subsequent rule violations and increases the average number of upvotes their later posts receive, an indicator of improved content quality. These effects are stronger when users experience repeated removals and when they observe peers’ posts being removed, highlighting both direct and vicarious learning mechanisms. For platform operators, the findings suggest that targeted, consistent, and transparent post removal can serve as an effective governance tool, not merely to suppress harmful content but to foster higher-quality participation over time. For policymakers and regulators, the results underscore the importance of moderation frameworks that promote user learning, accountability, and procedural fairness. Well-designed moderation systems can enhance community standards while maintaining legitimacy and trust in digital governance.

Equal Pay, Better Performance: The Organization‐Level Impact of Gender Pay Equality and Work–Life Balance

2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Human Resource Management
The popular press and consulting reports claim that organizations with gender equity are rewarded with a more productive workforce. Nevertheless, despite extensive research on the antecedents of the gender pay gap, we know little about how the organization‐level gender pay gap relates to labor productivity, particularly when considered alongside other interrelated human resource systems such as the work–life balance practices of the organization. Drawing on scholarship on multilevel strategic human resource processes that shape labor productivity, we theorize that organization‐level gender equity is positively associated with labor productivity such that in firms with gender‐equitable pay, alongside work–life balance, employees (regardless of gender) collaborate and collectively deploy human capital, increasing labor productivity. Data from 611 US firms and 6,255 UK firms suggest that the gender pay gap is negatively related to labor productivity, regardless of whether the country permits pay‐gap secrecy (US) or requires organizations to publicly disclose their gender pay gaps (UK). Organizations' gender pay gaps are also associated with the labor productivity trajectory: labor productivity decreased over time in organizations with greater gender pay gaps, but did not change significantly over time in organizations with moderate or lower gender pay gaps. Furthermore, organizations' gender pay gap and work–life balance interact, such that labor productivity is greatest in organizations with lower pay gaps and higher work–life balance. The results support the business case for gender equality—organizations with lower gender pay gaps and higher work–life balance exhibit higher labor productivity.

EXPRESS: High Tech, Not Low Touch: Empowering the B2B Sales Force through Online Channel Integration

2026-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing
As many B2B companies are transforming their sales processes by adding online channels to the sales force, it is critical to better understand how salespeople respond, adapt, and manage relationships after customers adopt them. Leveraging data from a large B2B firm, we investigate how customers’ integration of an online channel affects salesperson-customer relationships. We find that customer online channel integration leads to a 7% increase in quarterly customer gross margins, with 28% of a customer's sales volume shifting online, but only a 9% reduction in face-to-face sales transactions relative to that of before the online channel integration. Salespeople continue to hold a substantial number of face-to-face meetings to handle transactions and engage in other activities with customers that integrate the online channel than expected, given the proportion of sales volume that those customers shift online. Relatedly, customer integration of the online channel enhances the quality of salesperson-customer interaction within those relationships, reducing products sold at a loss and increasing the breadth of product categories sold. We also identify important contingency factors regarding online channel integration, including that its effectiveness when use is highly synchronized with face-to-face sales transaction meetings can further drive customer gross margins by about 16%.

Machine Learning and the Implementable Efficient Frontier

2026-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
We propose that investment strategies should be evaluated based on their net-of-trading-cost return for each level of risk, which we term the “implementable efficient frontier.” While numerous studies use machine learning return forecasts to generate portfolios, their agnosticism toward trading costs leads to excessive reliance on fleeting small-scale characteristics, resulting in poor net returns. We develop a framework that produces a superior frontier by integrating trading-cost-aware portfolio optimization with machine learning. The superior net-of-cost performance is achieved by learning directly about portfolio weights using an economic objective. Further, our model gives rise to a new measure of “economic feature importance.” (JEL C5, C61, G00, G11, G12)

A Review of Systems Perspectives in Sustainability: How Systems Properties Convey Systems-Wide Dynamics

2026-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Management
As seven of nine planetary boundaries are breached, management scholars face an urgent challenge: how can organizations address complex social-ecological crises that transcend traditional organizational boundaries and objectives? Responding to this need, researchers have leveraged a plurality of systems perspectives, yet current approaches remain nascent and fragmented. In this paper, we review 25 years (2000–2024) of empirical sustainability management research across 17 leading journals. We identify core systems properties—interrelatedness, nestedness, non-linearity, and emergence—that collectively illuminate four critical systems-wide dynamics: equilibrium, disequilibrium, adaptation, and organized systems change. This systematic review offers scholars a unified framework for theorizing and addressing critical sustainability challenges facing organizations, society, and the planet.

More Correlations Signal Causation: The Effect of Correlational Scope on Perceived Causality

2026-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Consumer Research
In the era of big data, an increasing amount of information is becoming available to business analysts and scientists. Statistical correlations between consumption patterns and individual conditions (e.g., health conditions) are frequently uncovered and reported in the media. However, many correlations are spurious, prompting the question of when consumers perceive them as reflecting causal relationships. Across eight preregistered studies, we demonstrate that a correlation (e.g., between drinking tea and bone health) is perceived as more likely to reflect a causal relationship (i.e., drinking tea makes bones healthier) when the plausible cause reportedly correlates with additional outcomes (e.g., heart conditions). The correlational scope effect is attenuated when the additional outcomes are perceived as weakly related to the focal outcome, mitigated under a cause-last framing (in which the plausible cause in a correlation is presented after the target outcome), and can influence product choices. We propose that category-based induction may contribute to the correlational scope effect: people project the perceived susceptibility to a cause from the additional outcomes onto the focal outcome. These findings have implications for our understanding of causal judgment and for consumers’ well-being.

Pricing Shared Rides

2026-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Operations Research
Pricing Based on Matching Outcomes Improves Shared Rides OperationsShared rides aspire to mitigate congestion and promote more sustainable urban transportation, but many platforms struggle to maintain a healthy and profitable shared rides product. Why have shared rides struggled, and how can platforms design a successful product? In “Pricing Shared Rides,” Chiwei Yan, Julia Yan, and Yifan Shen discuss the drawbacks of platforms’ existing pricing policies and show that a common approach to pricing suppresses demand and may even drive the platform out of the market. They then propose adjusting the price according to the extent she is matched with another rider—which proves to benefit both platform and riders alike in increased profitability and reduced payments. These benefits are especially pronounced in regimes with high cost and low demand, expanding shared rides access to areas where they have historically been most challenging to sustain.

EXPRESS: Not Just Bad Luck: Income-Based Gaps in Lottery Losses

2026-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing
This research uncovers a hidden dimension of inequality in lottery play: lower-income consumers not only spend a larger share of their income on lottery tickets—a well-documented regressive pattern—but also earn less per ticket due to systematic differences in how games are designed and played. Using market-level and transaction-level data from California, we show that lower-income consumers are less responsive to high-jackpot games, use random number generators less frequently, and favor popular number combinations. These behaviors interact with pari-mutuel prize structures to reduce expected earnings. Simulations indicate that these factors lead to approximately 7% higher losses per ticket for lower-income consumers, amounting to nearly $3 million annually. We evaluate alternative game formats and policy interventions—including fixed non-jackpot prizes, mandatory random selection, and raffle-style jackpots with decreasing odds—and find that they can reduce income-based disparities by up to 60%. By framing lottery products through the dimensions of function, ergonomics, and form, this research strengthens theoretical links between product design and consumer heterogeneity and offers actionable insights for policymakers seeking to design fairer games and more equitable consumer outcomes.

Pricing of Climate Risk Insurance: Regulation and Cross‐Subsidies

2026-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Journal of Finance
Homeowners insurance is central to managing the rising losses from climate‐related disasters. We show that insurance premiums are subject to starkly different regulations across states, creating persistent cross‐subsidies and price distortions. We employ states' regulatory rules in an instrumental variable estimation and a border discontinuity design to show insurers do not adjust rates in highly regulated states and compensate by raising rates in less regulated states. Rates and risks diverge in the long run, distorting cross‐state risk‐sharing and increasing insurer exits from highly regulated states. We argue these patterns stem from the interactions between rate regulation and insurers' financing constraints.

Contribute to MY IT Service: Encouraging Technology Extra-Role Behaviors in User-Artifact Interactions from a Psychological Ownership Perspective

2026-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Information Systems Research
“Contribute to MY IT Service: Encouraging Technology Extra-Role Behaviors in User-Artifact Interactions from a Psychological Ownership Perspective”This research aims to investigate how interactions with IT artifacts can sustain users’ continuance usage of, and encourage their voluntary contributions to, access-based and algorithm-empowered IT services (e.g., Spotify and Duolingo). This question is particularly important because in such contexts, users often have limited interactions with other human users—traditionally the main driver of the target behaviors in virtual communities. In the results, we found that users are more willing to use the technology and perform extra-role behaviors that benefit the technology when they develop a user-artifact relationship, after controlling the alternative mechanisms. We further explain how customization and personalization features facilitate users’ development of such a relationship by co-constructing an extended self with the IT artifact. For practitioners, our study mobilizes the user resources and promotes user voluntary contributions that benefit the technology (e.g., knowledge contribution, user feedback, new user referral, and voluntary payment). By incorporating the algorithm into self-concept as an extended self, we propose a new way of human-algorithm interaction, and hence are able to advise on algorithm appreciation and AI adoption in the non-competitive consumer technology context and provide guidelines and use cases on IT design regarding customization and personalization.

Large Language Models for Market Research: A Data-Augmentation Approach

2026-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Marketing Science
This paper proposes a statistical data augmentation approach that efficiently integrates LLM-generated data with real data in conjoint analysis.

The Role of the User Information Environment in mHealth Effectiveness

2026-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Information Systems Research
Despite the promise of mobile health (mHealth) systems, about half of interventions fail to show significant effects. We examine how users’ information environments—the sources from which they obtain health information—shape mHealth effectiveness. Using information integration theory, we ran a 25-month field experiment with 4,629 expectant mothers in rural China, testing an SMS intervention to reduce unnecessary C-sections. The intervention produced a 25.9% overall reduction, but effects depended on how mHealth information integrated with public and private sources. Public information, consistent with theory, overlaps with mHealth content and can complement it for unplanned pregnancies. In contrast, integrating mHealth with private information entails dynamics beyond simple information addition, including physician behavior. Results show that mHealth coupled with private information—especially care-seeking content—prompted more visits and inadvertently enabled provider-driven overtreatment rather than informed patient choice.For practice, mHealth efficacy is inseparable from social context. Providers should recognize that visits and decisions reflect family and peer influence and app design, not just clinical need, to avoid overtreatment. Developers should design with users’ existing information ecosystems rather than treat apps as isolated tools. Clinical guidelines should be updated to reflect mHealth-environment interactions, and patients should build media literacy to synthesize information from multiple sources.

Leveraging Multiview Data Through Discrete and Regularized Deep Learning for Dynamic Financial Risk Prediction

2026-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Information Systems Research
Given the dramatic surge of demand for predictive insights into the dynamics of financial risk and the rich, yet entangled, information brought by proliferating multiview data, we propose a discrete and regularized deep learning (DRDL) method to better leverage such multiview data for dynamic financial risk prediction. Empirical evaluation demonstrates advantages of DRDL over benchmarked classic and state-of-the-art methods at both the model level (time-to-risk and out-of-time prediction performance) and the application level (identification and profitability performance). Besides performance gains, DRDL offers distinctive practical advantages. First, it enables explicit and controllable factor-level representations, allowing practitioners to inspect and regulate how cross-view signals are encoded. Second, it offers unique advantages in explicitly and precisely filtering out redundant information while extracting complementary information across heterogeneous data sources, allowing practitioners to better understand which unique informational components drive risk predictions. Third, it offers a practically viable and empirically effective way to promote functional disentanglement within a discrete and structured latent space. Fourth, it supports both time-wise and instance-wise monotonicity, aligning predictions with the cumulative and irreversible nature of financial risk escalation, which may be particularly valuable in risk monitoring and governance contexts.

Hiring at the tip of the funnel: Externalizing the work of integrating and coordinating diverse human capital

2026-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
We adopt a network‐based perspective to examine the effects of hiring strategies in terms of the diversity of hiring sources. Considering the transferability of general and firm‐specific skills, we propose that firms can reduce integration costs while gaining diversity benefits when they hire from a focused set of firms that themselves hire broadly. We suggest that occupying this position in the mobility network enhances both innovation and productivity outcomes. Moreover, we posit that a strong cultural orientation, characterized by high intensity and consistency, further amplifies these benefits. Our analysis of mobility data from US public firms between 2005 and 2021 uncovers the pathways through which firms attain this position. Evidence from the panel matching method and fixed‐effects regressions provides support for our hypotheses.Managerial SummaryWe take a network perspective to understand how firms' hiring choices—particularly the range of companies they recruit from—shape their performance. We argue that firms can benefit when they hire from a small, consistent group of companies that themselves draw talent from many different firms. This approach allows firms to gain a wide variety of skills and experiences while keeping integration and onboarding challenges low, leading to more innovation and higher productivity. We also suggest that firms with a strong and consistent culture are even better positioned to take advantage of these benefits. Using data on employee movements among US public firms from 2005 to 2021, we show how firms attain this position, and find evidence in support of our hypotheses using panel matching and fixed effects models.

Frozen-State Value Iteration: Faster Reinforcement Learning by Freezing Slow States

2026-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
We study infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast–slow structure, in which some state variables evolve rapidly (fast states), whereas others change more gradually (slow states). This structure commonly arises in practice when decisions must be made at high frequencies over long horizons and when slowly changing information still plays a critical role in determining optimal actions. Examples include inventory control under slowly changing demand indicators or dynamic pricing with gradually shifting consumer behavior. Modeling the problem at the natural decision frequency leads to MDPs with discount factors close to one, making them computationally challenging. We propose a novel approximation strategy that freezes slow states during phases of lower level planning and subsequently applies value iteration to an auxiliary upper level MDP that evolves on a slower timescale. Freezing states for short periods of time leads to easier to solve lower level problems, whereas a slower upper level timescale allows for a more favorable discount factor. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by our frozen-state approach, and this leads to simple insights on how to trade off regret versus computational cost. Empirically, we benchmark our new frozen-state methods on three domains: (i) inventory control with fixed order costs, (ii) a grid world problem with spatial tasks, and (iii) dynamic pricing with reference price effects. We demonstrate that the new methods produce high-quality policies with significantly less computation, and we show that simply omitting slow states is often a poor heuristic.This paper was accepted by J. George Shanthikumar, data science.Funding: This research is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation [Grant 1807536].Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00012 .

Venture Exits: A Review and Future Research Agenda

2026-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Management
Exits are key events in the life cycles of entrepreneurial ventures. Venture exits have immense practical impacts on a variety of stakeholders, including founders, employees, organizations, resource providers, and broader ecosystems. As a result, the phenomenon of venture exits is of interest to a broad community of scholars across fields such as general management, entrepreneurship, finance and accounting, strategy, economics, organizational behavior, and psychology. We examine the multidisciplinary literature on venture exits, including initial public offerings, acquisitions, buy-outs, secondary sales, and related exit events, by analyzing 317 research articles published from 1991 to 2025. We integrate extant findings into a unified model describing the pre-exit, exit execution, and post-exit phases across multiple units of analysis: the individual, venture, resource provider, and environment. We identify common themes, predominant tensions, and important gaps, laying the foundation for a reinvigorated research agenda. Central to this agenda is embracing a process perspective that considers the fluidity of the actors, interests, and resources shaping venture exit decisions and outcomes. Grounded in our review, this perspective offers new insights into venture exits while creating opportunities to meaningfully challenge and advance existing approaches and theories.

Explaining Variability in Employee Perceptions of HR Practices in Strategic HRM Research: An Integrative Review and Future Outlook

2026-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Human Resource Management
Employee perceptions of human resource (HR) practices have become a central focus in strategic human resource management (HRM) research due to their impact on individual and organizational outcomes. Recent studies highlight the importance of understanding how these perceptions are formed, what they encompass, and why they vary across employees. This special issue ofHuman Resource Managementaims to advance this evolving area of research by focusing on variability in employee perceptions of HR practices. We review the current literature on employee perceptions of HR practices, including (1) theoretical and conceptual clarity of the employee perceptions of HR practices construct, (2) antecedents of these perceptions across multiple levels (i.e., individual, HR department, (line) management, and organizational levels), (3) stakeholder alignment, and (4) the dynamic nature of perceptions of HR practices. We then consolidate existing research by offering an integrated overview based on extant studies, incorporating the four themes featured in this special issue. To guide future research, we present a comprehensive agenda aimed at fostering a more nuanced understanding of employee perceptions of HR practices, thereby enhancing both theoretical insights and practical impact in strategic HRM.

De Gustibus and Disputes about Reference Dependence

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Economic Studies
Existing tests of reference-dependent preferences assume universal loss aversion. This paper examines the implications of heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes for such tests. In experiments on labour supply and exchange behaviour, we first measure gain-loss attitudes and then study a canonical treatment effect that distinguishes different models of reference dependence. We document substantial heterogeneity in gain-loss attitudes and evidence against universal loss aversion. Moreover, we find heterogeneous treatment effects over gain-loss attitudes consistent with formulations of expectations-based reference points. Assuming homogeneous preferences would lead to different and potentially incorrect conclusions in these tests. Our findings provide foundational support for reference points derived from expectations and help reconcile inconsistencies in prior empirical exercises.

Normal Approximation in Large Network Models

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Economic Studies
We prove a central limit theorem for network formation models with strategic interactions and homophilous agents. Since data often consists of observations on a single large network, we consider an asymptotic framework in which the network size diverges. We argue that a modification of “stabilization” conditions from the literature on geometric graphs provides a useful high-level formulation of weak dependence which we utilize to establish an abstract central limit theorem. Using results in branching process theory, we derive interpretable primitive conditions for stabilization. The main conditions restrict the strength of strategic interactions and equilibrium selection mechanism. We discuss practical inference procedures justified by our results.

Beyond disclosure: Can firms be forced to spend their way to social responsibility?

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Accounting Studies
We study India’s regulation requiring firms to create board-level CSR committees and spend 2% of profits on CSR initiatives targeting environmental sustainability and local socioeconomic development. We examine whether such a mandate can meaningfully enhance corporate social responsibility. We find significant improvements in environmental and social ratings of Indian firms relative to matched global peers, particularly in community engagement and natural resource stewardship. Outcome-based measures, such as waste and resource use, also indicate real effects. Notably, improvements occur only in firms that substantially increase CSR spending and establish independent, expert committees; firms that merely comply superficially show muted effects. Our findings suggest that, despite criticisms of mandated CSR as paradoxical or potentially rent-seeking, such regulations can effectively promote socially responsible business practices when implemented with sufficient commitment and oversight.

Sourcing with Demand Updates

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
We study a two-stage newsvendor model where the initially uncertain mean demand is revealed midstream, allowing for a second, costlier order to be placed. The two-stage process is relevant to many retailers who have access to two supply options: a long-lead, low-cost option where orders need to be placed under much demand uncertainty, and a short-lead, high-cost option after a signal is revealed that updates the mean demand. We introduce a forecast evolution model that describes how the initial forecast for mean demand varies in response to the signal, which generalizes the popular additive and multiplicative martingale model of forecast evolution (MMFE). We show that the optimal first-stage order solves a simple ordinary differential equation (ODE), whereas the second-stage order is analytically available. We characterize asymptotics for the first-stage order and expected profit as the forecasted mean demand grows, and propose a simple, asymptotically optimal heuristic. We apply our study to data from a national retail chain, where we calibrate our model by maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). The comparison of several heuristic policies, as well as two benchmarks, shows the efficacy of our method. When the signal is more uncertain (e.g., for product lines with impulse- and trend-driven purchases), our heuristic with a simple adjusted critical fractile outperforms benchmarks; otherwise, the classic newsvendor solution performs well and is asymptotically optimal. We also extend the approach to distribution-free settings and capacitated systems.This paper was accepted by Jeannette Song, operations management.Funding: This work was supported by the Guangdong Key Lab of Mathematical Foundations for Artificial Intelligence [Grant 72192805], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72401245], Imperial Business School (School Research Fund), and Shenzhen Stability Science Program 2022.Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04692 .

The Effect of CEO Political Ideology on Firms' Implementation of ESOP and Work‐Family Benefits

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Human Resource Management
Drawing on research on political ideology and the HRM literature, we postulate that the degree to which CEOs are politically liberal will affect firms' use of employee stock ownership plans (ESOP) and work‐family benefits in two distinct ways. First, political liberalism increases CEOs' motivation to practice egalitarianism (including more equal compensation). Second, liberalism steers CEOs to be open to practices that foster social changes. Hence, we contend that CEO political liberalism will increase the firm's likelihood of implementing ESOP and work‐family benefits. Further, we suggest that certain contingencies will moderate these associations. Results derived from a dataset ofFortune500 firms based in the US from 2002 to 2018 (n= 2,363) support our arguments. We measured ESOP by a binary variable indicating whether a firm implemented any stock ownership program in a year, while work‐family benefits was captured by a dummy suggesting whether a firm had a work‐life balance policy in a year. Our findings contribute to the literature on HRM practice implementation and political ideology.

(How) Can Performance Appraisals Improve Employee Creativity? A Multidimensional Perspective

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Human Resource Management
Performance appraisal (PA) is commonly used by organizations to manage their employees. However, the role of PAs in employee creativity remains ambiguous, with positive, negative, or even nonsignificant relationships reported in the literature. The aim of the present research is to address this ambiguity. Drawing on multidimensional conceptualizations of PA and creativity, and integrating self‐determination theory and expectancy theory with selection, optimization, and compensation theory, we develop a multilevel conceptual framework incorporating diverse linkages between PAs and creativity. Time‐lagged survey data were collected from 582 research and development employees working in 49 companies. The results indicate that developmental PA is positively related to radical creativity via intrinsic motivation, with age augmenting this indirect linkage. In contrast, administrative PA is positively related to incremental creativity through extrinsic motivation, with age attenuating this indirect relationship. These findings extend the theoretical understanding of the PA–creativity relationship and offer important practical insights into the utility of PAs in managing employee creativity.

Signaling Effects of Women's Quotas: An Analysis of Workforce Perceptions and Reactions

2026-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Human Resource Management
Women's quotas are widely used to promote gender equality in organizations, yet little is known about how the general workforce perceives and reacts to them. Drawing on signaling theory, we examine employees' awareness of women's quotas and how it influences their reactions. Using data from the Linked Personnel Panel, a representative German dataset linking employer and employee reports (N= 2270), we distinguish between signal awareness and signal interpretation to assess their distinct roles. Awareness differs systematically between women and men, with women more likely to correctly recognize whether a quota exists. At the same time, we observe substantial misalignment between formal policy and employee perception: 42.6% of employees fail to recognize an existing quota, and 30.0% believe a quota exists where it does not. Perceiving a quota is associated with higher work engagement among both women and men; however, this relationship is significantly weaker when quotas are legally obligated, indicating that external obligation reduces their signaling value. Theoretically, our study advances signaling research in HRM and diversity by showing that awareness is a critical precondition and that employees respond to quotas based on their signaling value. Practically, our findings suggest that organizations should actively ensure quotas are noticed and interpreted as commitments to gender equality, as complying with legal obligations alone is insufficient.

Patent regime shift and firm innovation strategy: Evidence from the Second Amendment to China's Patent Law

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
While changes in intellectual property rights (IPR) protection significantly shape firm innovation, the mechanisms driving firms' responses remain poorly understood. Leveraging the Second Amendment to China's Patent Law, which strengthens appropriability particularly for state‐owned enterprises (SOEs), as a natural experiment, we show that stronger IPR has mixed effects on SOEs' innovation. While SOEs increase the rate of innovation subsequent to the Amendment, they shift the direction of innovation toward more familiar areas in which they face a lesser need to adjust existing routines. This directional change suggests a quality decline in SOEs' innovation that may be attributed to path dependence. We further show that this change varies systematically depending on different firm‐ and industry‐level characteristics that loosen or tighten the historical grip of path dependence.Managerial SummaryThis study offers valuable insights for corporate leaders navigating intellectual property rights (IPR) reforms and shaping their firms' innovation strategies, particularly in emerging economies. While stronger IPR protection can increase innovation output, it may also lead firms to concentrate on familiar technologies rather than pursue more novel ideas. Thus, corporate leaders should look beyond patent volume as a performance metric and instead foster creative thinking and engage in external collaborations to access new, cutting‐edge knowledge. Such efforts can help firms move beyond established routines and strengthen their long‐term competitiveness. To promote innovation of greater novelty, policymakers must complement stronger IPR protection with broader institutional support, including enhancing economic freedom, encouraging market competition, and cultivating a culture that values breakthrough innovation.

Shaping expectations, losing flexibility: A study of CEO promises as strategic communication tools

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
CEO promises are powerful but understudied communication tools. We develop a dual‐mechanism framework theorizing that while CEO promises elevate stakeholder expectations, they simultaneously constrain strategic flexibility. We argue that CEO promise‐making is shaped by two competing pressures: making more promises when the need to manage expectations upward is heightened and fewer promises when the need to preserve flexibility is increased. Further, we predict that under heightened uncertainty, CEOs preserve flexibility through strategic ambiguity (i.e., issuing promises with extended or vague time horizons and lower specificity). Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze over 69,000 earnings‐call transcripts from S&P 1500 firms (2010–2022), we identify 74,017 CEO promises and find support for our predictions. We contribute an original, publicly available dataset of CEO promises.Managerial SummaryWhen CEOs publicly promise positive future results, they shape how investors and analysts view the company. These promises are a double‐edged sword: they can boost investor and stakeholder confidence, but they also lock the company into a pre‐determined path and make later shortfalls or pivots reputationally costly. Analyzing more than 69,000 earnings calls (2010–2022), we find that CEOs make more promises when needing to prove their legitimacy, such as during early tenure, when facing gender bias, or after missing earnings targets. However, in uncertain environments, CEOs often pull back from promise‐making or employ “strategic ambiguity” by making promises with vaguer timelines and details to maintain flexibility. Our analysis suggests that failing to deliver on these public commitments significantly increases the likelihood of CEO dismissal.

Framing novelty in crowdfunding: Which words win support, where, and at what stakes

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal
We examine how promotional language (“hype”) in reward‐based crowdfunding is associated with campaign success, and whether those associations vary across sector contexts and with campaign execution burden. Using dictionary‐based text measures from 635 U.S. Kickstarter campaigns across five sectors, we distinguish three novelty‐framing moves: capability/rigor language, excellence/status language, and attitude/affect language. We find no uniform association between aggregate hype and success. Instead, the observed associations vary systematically across rhetorical moves, sectors, and goal levels. Capability/rigor language is positively associated with success in Technology, attitude/affect language is positively associated with success in Entertainment, and excellence/status language is negatively associated with success in Design. Beyond these sector differences, the paper's clearest cross‐cutting pattern is that capability/rigor language becomes more positively associated with success as funding goals increase.Managerial SummaryThe value of “hype” on Kickstarter depends on what is said, what is being offered, and how ambitious the ask is. In our data, Technology campaigns are more positively associated with success when descriptions emphasize testing, technical specificity, and execution readiness, whereas Entertainment campaigns are more positively associated with attitude/affect language. In contrast, excellence/status claims are associated with lower success in Design. Across contexts, the clearest pattern is that feasibility‐oriented language becomes more positively associated with success as funding goals increase, suggesting that larger asks benefit more from cues of deliverability than from undifferentiated promotional intensity.

The impact of auditor reputation impairments on private-client market share

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Accounting Studies
We examine the impact of auditors’ reputation impairments on their private-client market share to explore how conducting low-quality audits affects auditors’ broader client portfolios. Prior evidence implies that an audit office loses public-client market share after a client announces a restatement. However, auditors’ private clients may be less concerned about auditor reputation and quality, given that they have lower agency costs and their financial statement users are often creditors that can rely on direct monitoring to narrow information asymmetry. Also, differences between public and private company audits cast doubt on whether public-client restatements are relevant to private clients. We find that the private-client market share of a Big Four audit office falls by, on average, 5 percent the year after a public client announces a restatement. This evidence suggests that Big Four offices cannot simply replace lost public-client revenue with private-client revenue after suffering reputation damage.

EXPRESS: Customer Acquisition Through Intermediaries (vs. Brand) Shapes Lifetime Value: Evidence from the Hotel Industry

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
Third-party distribution channels or intermediaries have become ubiquitous across a wide range of industries, offering firms access to new prospects and an opportunity to expand their customer base. Although prior work has investigated the short-term aggregate demand implications of intermediaries, the long-term customer relationship perspective has remained unexplored. Using customer-level data from a large U.S. hotel brand, we show that customers acquired via travel intermediaries (such as online travel agents or OTAs) have persistently different behaviors on several dimensions that matter for long-term value. Compared to customers acquired through brand-owned (direct) channels, intermediary-acquired customers spend 4.1% less per stay and purchase 3.8% less frequently. Intermediary-acquired customers, while displaying stronger channel inertia and lower multichannel engagement, purchase across a wider variety of brands (multi-brand behavior). When we combine these behavioral estimates into a customer lifetime value (CLV) computation, we find that while intermediary-acquired customers have positive CLV, their CLV is 19.94% lower than customers acquired through brand-owned channels, revealing, for the first time, the long-term implications of such customer acquisition strategies. Through an optimal allocation model we show that, although the CLVs are lower for intermediaries, a CLV-maximizing firm typically invests in both channels: the optimal share allocated to intermediaries rising proportionally with the intermediary’s acquisition efficiency and accessible prospect pool, and falling when the hotel is operating at capacity. In sum, our results show that although using intermediaries may be a viable strategy for customer acquisition, the purchase behaviors of these customers are significantly and meaningfully different from customers acquired via brand-owned channels, thus urging managers to adopt a more nuanced ‘frenemies’ approach to building a channel portfolio.

EXPRESS: Please Arrive On Time: The Impact of Early and Delayed Delivery on Product Ratings

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
In digital marketplaces, product ratings play a critical role in shaping consumer demand and seller success, yet their relationship with logistical factors remains unexplored. This study investigates how deviations from promised delivery dates, whether early or delayed, influence product ratings. Using transaction-level data from a major e-commerce platform encompassing over 11M product purchases and 500K customers, we estimate the causal effect of deviating from the promised delivery time on both rating incidence and valence. To overcome the challenges of matching imposed by an unbalanced treatment and control distribution, we used a machine learning based estimator, R-learner, to estimate the effects of interest. We find that both delayed and early deliveries increase customers’ likelihood of leaving a rating but reduce rating valence. Delayed deliveries lower rating valence by an average of 0.4, with some categories seeing a drop of up to 0.6. Early deliveries also reduce rating valence, with an average decrease of 0.2 and reductions of up to 0.5 depending on the product category. The negative effect of early delivery is consistent across all categories, except for food and beverages, where experienced customers show a small positive response. This is due to reduced uncertainty from reordering previously purchased products, a pattern that does not occur as often in other categories. We contribute to the service and logistics performance literature by establishing the causal link between delivery performance and product ratings by quantifying the direction and magnitude of these effects across various product categories and customer segments. We propose managerial implications for mitigating customer dissatisfaction arising from both early and delayed deliveries.

EXPRESS: Faith in Disaster Preparedness: Insights on the Influence of Religion on Humanitarian Volunteer Relief Operations

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
Religious beliefs have often served as a lens through which communities interpret and cope with disasters. Not surprisingly, many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that support disaster relief have roots in religious traditions. The religious orientation of an NGO is a key concern as it can influence volunteer outcomes and operational performance. This is important because volunteers are an indispensable asset for NGOs, playing a pivotal role in the efficacy of humanitarian aid efforts. This study employs social capital and person-organization fit theories to examine how NGO religiousness influences social capital, volunteer behaviors, and operational performance. It also analyzes how NGO and volunteer religiousness “fit” affects these relationships. The hypotheses were tested using two scenario-based video experiments: Experiment 1, which collected data from 100 students in a laboratory setting, and Experiment 2, which involved 198 online volunteers. Results from Tobit and Poisson regressions indicate that increased NGO religiousness may diminish volunteer social capital, commitment, and operational performance. However, NGO and volunteer religiousness “fit” mitigates the adverse effects of NGO religiousness, enhancing volunteer behaviors. A large-scale survey of 503 respondents supports these findings and provides insights to guide future research into volunteer motivations. This study contributes to the Humanitarian Operations Management literature and informs the strategies of NGOs regarding religious alignments, volunteer recruitment and retention, and operational performance.

EXPRESS: VotingWait Times and Political Misinformation on Social Media

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
The direct impacts of long wait times in elections, such as lost wages for voters and suppressed turnout, are well-documented. Drawing upon the service operations literature, we hypothesize that such operational inefficiencies may have far-reaching consequences beyond the immediate voter experience, in particular, the spread of political misinformation. Using a novel dataset that combines granular measures of voter wait times from cellphone location data, social media content, and demographic information at the county level, we find evidence that longer wait times are associated with greater sharing of political fake news on Reddit in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Importantly, this relationship exhibits significant heterogeneity based on the racial composition of counties, with more diverse counties experiencing greater increases in misinformation spread due to wait times. To shed light on the mechanisms underlying this link, we leverage individual-level survey data on voters’ polling place experiences and perceptions of electoral integrity. Our analysis reveals that experiencing long wait times erodes voters’ confidence in the integrity of the election process, particularly at the local level. These findings underscore the societal importance of efficient election operations management and highlight how they can have profound implications for the health of democracy. Our work introduces a new factor—the operational efficiency of election administration—into the study of political misinformation, thus opening up avenues for operations management research to contribute to a pressing social challenge.

Stylistic Differentiation in Cultural Markets: The Benefits of Conspicuous Category Spanning

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Organization Science
A consistent finding in research on cultural markets is that innovation often involves recombining stylistic features across categorical boundaries. Cultural products routinely borrow features from other categories while maintaining their primary classification. However, we observe considerable variance in outcomes: Some borrowing achieves remarkable success, whereas others fail spectacularly. Existing theories of optimal differentiation and category spanning tell us that balancing familiarity and novelty matters and that improperly spanning categories can be costly, yet they provide limited guidance on how to differentiate effectively by borrowing features from alternative categories. Analyzing nearly 6,000 films and the narrative features they employ, I find that borrowing succeeds when products incorporate recognizable, familiar features from other categories. I further show that borrowing from sparsely populated categories provides greater benefits than borrowing from crowded ones, because audiences grow weary of features associated with oversaturated categories. These findings reconcile two influential but previously unconnected perspectives: the theory of optimal differentiation and the theory of category-spanning penalties. The results reveal conditions under which borrowing from other categories can enhance rather than diminish appeal and demonstrate that differentiation strategies succeed when borrowing is visible and interpretable to audiences.Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18354 .

When the Headlines Fade, the Story Goes On: Investigating How Local Newspaper Decline Affects Firm CSR Engagement

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Organization Science
We investigate how the decline of local newspapers affects firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement. Historically, local newspapers have shaped firms’ informational environments by providing two interconnected functions that influence local stakeholders’ perceptions: external monitoring and enhanced visibility of corporate behaviors. Their decline weakens both functions simultaneously, creating uncertainty about how firms adjust behaviors sensitive to scrutiny and public recognition. We develop a contingency framework explaining how firms respond to this dual erosion depending on the broader informational environment. We theorize that nonlocal informational intermediaries—national newspapers, financial analysts, and credit rating agencies—shape whether firms continue to experience credible accountability pressures or opportunities for public visibility, and that firms respond differently to local newspaper decline based on the availability of these intermediaries. When such intermediaries remain active, firms face sustained evaluative scrutiny and retain channels through which CSR activities can be communicated, increasing the strategic value of CSR. When they are absent, diminished oversight and limited visibility reduce both the pressures and incentives to maintain CSR, making retrenchment more likely. Interviews with journalists and corporate executives contextualize and refine the proposed mechanisms by illustrating how firms interpret the erosion of local oversight and visibility and navigate evolving informational ecosystems. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design exploiting local newspaper declines across U.S. counties from 1996 to 2014, we find evidence consistent with these heterogeneous responses. Our theory advances understanding of how firms strategically adapt their CSR engagement to evolving informational environments.Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.18968 .

No-Regret Bayesian Recommendation to Homogeneous Users

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Operations Research
No-Regret Bayesian Recommendation to Homogeneous UsersWe introduce and study the online Bayesian recommendation problem for a recommender system platform. The platform has the privilege to privately observe a utility-relevant state of a product at each round and uses this information to make online recommendations to a stream of myopic users. This paradigm is common in a wide range of scenarios in the current internet economy. The platform commits to an online recommendation policy that utilizes its information advantage on the product state to persuade self-interested users to follow the recommendation. Because the platform does not know users’ preferences or beliefs in advance, we study the platform’s online learning problem of designing an adaptive recommendation policy to persuade users while gradually learning users’ preferences and beliefs en route. Specifically, we aim to design online learning policies with no Stackelberg regret for the platform, that is, against the optimal benchmark policy in hindsight under the assumption that users will correspondingly adapt their responses to the benchmark policy. Our first result is an online policy that achieves double logarithmic regret dependence on the number of rounds. We also present an information-theoretic lower bound showing that no adaptive online policy can achieve regret with better dependency on the number of rounds. Finally, by formulating the platform’s problem as optimizing a linear program with membership oracle access, we present our second online recommendation policy that achieves regret with polynomial dependence on the number of states but logarithmic dependence on the number of rounds.

Asset Pricing in a World of Imperfect Foresight

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
A key assumption of dynamic asset pricing theory is that agents have perfect foresight: for all future contingencies, they correctly foresee the corresponding equilibrium prices. Is it possible for prices to still reflect perfect foresight even if agents have imperfect foresight? We answer affirmatively, provided agents exhibit a mild form of narrow framing, which we refer to as dynamic narrow framing: while accounting for future endowments, agents ignore retrading opportunities. This behavior vastly simplifies computation of optimal choices because it obviates the need to form beliefs about future prices. Obviously, choices will generally be different, and hence, suboptimal, compared with those that obtain if agents were to optimize dynamically using perfect foresight about future prices. With a controlled experiment, we verify that our behavioral assumption explains both prices and choices. Our findings allow us to reinterpret the successes (when evaluating prices only) and failures (when evaluating prices against choices) of traditional tests of asset pricing theory on historical data from the field.This paper was accepted by Lukas Schmid, finance.Funding: P. Bossaerts acknowledges funding from the Australian Research Council [Grant DP180102284], from a R@MAP Chair at the University of Melbourne, and from The Leverhulme Trust.Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2025.03690 .

Collaborative Work Management Technologies and Managerial Intensity in U.S. Corporations: An Examination

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
Do digital technologies reinforce managerial hierarchies or, instead, make them less relevant? We propose that the answer to this question depends on the nature of the technology: specifically, its relative impact on managers’ capacity to supervise and on subordinates’ need for supervision. Applying this framework to collaborative work management (CWM) technologies that facilitate real-time collaboration, communication, and task coordination, we predict that the adoption of such technologies should reduce managerial intensity and increase decentralization in organizations. To test this prediction, we use a difference-in-differences design on a novel data set built from over 26 million job listings (Lightcast) and over 20 million social profiles (Revelio) matched to 3,017 U.S. public firms in Compustat, which we track over the period from 2010 to 2019. We find that over the observation window, CWM technology adopters show a 3% reduction in managerial intensity and a 5%–7% increase in nonmanagerial skills linked to decentralization in their job postings in the years following adoption. The pattern of results is robust to a battery of validations, alternative measures, and specifications, and it strongly supports the idea that these technologies enable collaboration and make organizations less hierarchical along the dimensions that we studied.This paper was accepted by Sameer Srivastava, organizations.Funding: P. Gulati acknowledges financial support from the UCL School of Management, the Ian Potter ‘93 PhD Award at INSEAD, and the Will Mitchell Dissertation Research Grant. P. Puranam acknowledges financial support from the Desmarais Fund at INSEAD for the Organizations & Algorithms Project.Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.04127 .

Leave It to Me: Overconfident CEOs ’ Lower Propensity to Delegate Acquisition Responsibility

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Management Studies
Overconfident CEOs have been shown to lead their firms to achieve different outcomes, but the literature has only a limited understanding why this is the case. In this paper, we focus on whether overconfident CEOs run their firms differently, focusing on a key internal interaction: CEOs' choices regarding whether to delegate to other executives. Delegation is increasingly required given the growing size and complexity of public firms, yet surprisingly, most prior empirical work on delegation has been focused on lower‐level managers or non‐strategic tasks. We argue why overconfident CEOs would have a lower baseline tendency to delegate, and then posit how overconfidence interacts with contextual considerations, such that overconfident CEOs are less responsive to these cues than other CEOs. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 3690 merger and acquisition announcements and find evidence that overconfident CEOs are less likely to delegate compared to other CEOs and less responsive to multiple indicators at the task and firm level. Our paper's central contribution is that CEO overconfidence, a widely studied psychological trait in external risk‐taking and acquisitions, also shapes the internal management of firms via a different pattern and approach to delegating responsibility to other top executives.

Controlling the Control Condition: A Critical Methodological Review of Control Conditions in Experimental Management Research

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Management
Control conditions are essential to establishing causal relationships in experimental management research, yet they receive little attention compared to treatments. This study thus examines the current state of control-condition selection and design in top-tier management journals, reviewing 958 experiments from 421 study papers published from 2021 to 2023. Our review shows that researchers use true and pseudo-control conditions. True control conditions—such as no-treatment, all-but-treatment, and treatment-as-usual controls—provide a baseline for interpreting the effect of the treatment condition. In contrast, pseudo-control conditions (e.g., opposite-treatment-level or alternative-treatment designs) allow relative comparisons across conditions without providing a baseline. Notably, 20% of the studies we examined presented causal claims that were not supported by their designs, opening the risk of their results being misinterpreted and their effect sizes being exaggerated. These issues were further exacerbated by a lack of method transparency and construct validity. In response, we offer guidelines not only for primary study researchers to support the selection and design of control conditions, thereby enhancing transparency and yielding valid interpretations of causal claims, but also for research synthesists, reviewers, and editors to evaluate the same.

Occupational Identity Formation in Unsaturated Spaces: The Layered Accretion of the American Astronaut’s Identity

2026-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Administrative Science Quarterly
How does the process of identity formation unfold in emerging occupations? While extant research has focused primarily on occupational identity formation through differentiation from other occupational groups, we theorize identity formation in occupations that emerge in unsaturated spaces, where competitive dynamics are less salient. We address this question through a qualitative historical analysis of American astronauts at the inception of space exploration (1958–1974). Our work theorizes layered accretion as a distinct identity formation process whereby a new occupation’s identity begins with importing an identity from an existing occupation (proto identity), refinement of the identity through work–identity alignment (core identity), and subsequent layering of new, distinct identities that are accreted on to the core. We specify the mechanisms underpinning layered accretion and contribute to deeper understanding of how multiple identities are managed in the early stages of identity formation in new occupations.

Limiting Accessibility: How Targeting Consumers with Disabilities Constrains Acceptable Prices for Innovations

2026-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Consumer Research
People with disabilities constitute 15% of the world’s population with a total disposable income of more than $2.6 trillion. However, few companies offer products tailored to the needs of this segment, making it important to understand how mass-market consumers react to innovations that target people with disabilities. Nine studies and six supplementary studies (twelve preregistered) reveal that innovations targeting consumers with disabilities are subject to comparatively greater scrutiny by mass-market consumers. Specifically, consumers find charging price premiums for innovative products less acceptable when they are targeted at people with disabilities. The aversion to targeting this segment occurs only when firms charge a price premium and persists even when firms provide cost justifications for the relatively higher prices. Drawing on research on disability stereotypes, we identify pity for people with disabilities as a critical driver of these reactions. Variations in pity across disabilities are related to the acceptability of a price premium for adaptive innovations. These findings are suggestive of a novel form of paternalism against consumers with disabilities. Paradoxically, this view may render the marketplace less inclusive for consumers with disabilities, as it could penalize companies that provide more options for this underserved segment.

Success and Failure in Blockchain-Based Interorganizational Ecosystems: A Governance Perspective

2026-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Management
Interorganizational ecosystems require governance arrangements that can align diverse and often competing organizations around a shared value proposition. Although blockchain, as a form of digital governance, promises to facilitate large-scale collaboration by codifying and enforcing rules, decentralizing control, and ensuring verifiable data exchange, many blockchain-based interorganizational ecosystems nevertheless fail. Leveraging 155 interviews and detailed internal records from a large technology provider covering 81 interorganizational blockchain projects across 25 industries, supplemented by archival evidence on the trajectories of 196 projects and 70 podcast interviews, we develop a grounded theory explaining how governance misalignments trigger collaboration breakdowns. Specifically, we identify three underlying governance tradeoffs that expose tensions between blockchain’s network-centric rules and actor-centric needs: consistency versus flexibility in coordination, system reliance versus actor reliance in trust and control, and ecosystem utility versus member utility in incentives. These tradeoffs are amplified or attenuated by corresponding boundary conditions related to scale and cohesion (for coordination), co-opetition (for trust and control), and value logics (for incentives). Our study advances governance theory by explaining how blockchain interacts with traditional governance, shapes critical tradeoffs, and influences ecosystem success and failure. We also offerdesign principles to help managersnavigate the inherent governance tradeoffs in ecosystem collaboration.

MAking The Invisible Hand Visible: Managers and The Allocation of Workers to Jobs

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Why do managers matter for firm performance? This paper provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational firm. The data covers 200,000 white-collar workers and 30,000 managers over 11 years in 100 countries. I identify good managers by their speed of promotion and leverage exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams. I find that good managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through lateral and vertical transfers and generate large and persistent gains in workers’ career progression and productivity. My results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers’ specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers’ time at the firm.

Technology Sophistication Across Establishments

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Quarterly Journal of Economics
We study technology sophistication using a novel approach that measures the sophistication of the most advanced (MAX) and the most widely used (MOST) technologies in each of the key business functions within establishments. Using data from over 21,000 establishments across 15 countries, we find that establishments generally underutilize the most sophisticated technologies available within a business function. These MAX-MOST gaps are persistent and strongly associated with productivity both across establishments and countries. At the establishment level, there is substantial variation in both MAX and MOST, with MOST showing a more skewed distribution. MAX and MOST follow different lifecycle patterns in low-income countries and among small establishments, and they exhibit different associations with several establishment characteristics and performance indicators. This evidence underscores the different nature of the technology upgrading processes that drive MAX and MOST.

Algorithmic Targeting and the Precision-Recall Tradeoff

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Marketing Science
We examine the implications of competitive algorithmic targeting when outcomes of targeting algorithms are the individual consumer-level predicted probabilities of conversion. In these situations, firms implicitly face the well-known precision-recall tradeoff while choosing their targeting strategies. They can choose to target a smaller set of consumers with a high probability of conversion (precision) but miss out on many consumers who might still be interested in their product. Conversely, firms can target a larger set of consumers (recall), but this results in a greater probability that their targeting is wasted on uninterested consumers. We analyze this precision-recall tradeoff under competition between firms that strategically choose their algorithmic targeting policies. We show that competing firms favor a targeting policy that has higher precision but lower recall compared with a monopoly. Firms target fewer consumers when their algorithms are more correlated. They also have the incentive to strategically decrease the precision of their targeting policies in order to reduce competition. If firms endogenously choose their algorithmic correlation, then there is an equilibrium incentive to decrease the correlation.History: Anthony Dukes served as the senior editor for this article.Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2024.0930 .

Advertiser Learning in Direct Advertising Markets

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Marketing Science
By pooling information across many advertisers, direct buy ad networks can alleviate advertiser uncertainty about where to place ads, increasing publisher revenue and advertiser welfare.

Improving Cash-Constrained Smallholder Farmers’ Revenue: The Role of Government Loans

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
This paper examines how the need for immediate cash by smallholder farmers may lead to undesirable selling decisions that hurt their revenue and analyzes the efficacy of government loan policies in tackling this challenge. We develop a game-theoretic model to characterize the base scenario of no loan, uncovering the impacts of cash needs on farmers’ revenue. We then examine how a government loan, under which farmers store some of their production at government warehouses in exchange for immediate cash, may counteract these negative impacts. We analyze and optimize two types of policies: one in which all farmers are eligible (a homogeneous loan) and another in which the loan is offered only to farmers whose production is below a certain threshold (a heterogeneous loan). Our results demonstrate that, when designed properly, both loans simultaneously increase aggregate farmer revenue and generate a more equitable revenue distribution among farmers. Nonetheless, overly generous loans can be counterproductive and harm farmers. We further show that heterogeneous loans achieve optimal market outcomes with lower government expenditure when cash needs are moderately high. We then contrast the two policies across key metrics related to farmers. Whereas the homogeneous loan better mitigates inequity among farmers, the heterogeneous loan helps more farmers meet cash needs. These results underscore that government loan design must carefully account for farmers’ strategic responses to the policy to generate positive societal outcomes. Finally, we use field data from India to numerically illustrate our insights and demonstrate the economic impacts of the policies studied.This paper was accepted by Jeannette Song, operations management.Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.06206 .

On the Quality of Cryptocurrency Markets: Centralized vs. Decentralized Exchanges

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
We analyze the market quality of centralized crypto exchanges and decentralized blockchain-based venues (DEXs) using a unique and comprehensive data set. Focusing on two fundamental aspects, transaction costs and deviations from the no-arbitrage condition, we estimate the causal effect of gas fees on DEX market quality. We show that these fixed costs impose a significant burden on relatively small trades and cause persistent arbitrage deviations. Conversely, DEXs offer more competitive transaction costs for larger trades, offering a more favorable environment for institutional investors. Furthermore, we provide causal evidence that innovations aimed at enhancing the flexibility of liquidity provision in DEX markets lead to sizeable improvements in market quality.This paper was accepted by Agostino Capponi, finance.Funding: A. Ranaldo acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation nccr–on the move [Grant 204721].Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.07703 .

Consumer Choice and Corporate Bankruptcy

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Journal of Finance
We estimate the indirect costs of corporate bankruptcy associated with lost customers. In incentivized experiments, randomly informing consumers about a firm's Chapter 11 reorganization lowers their willingness to pay for the firm's products by 17% to 28%. Consumers worry that bankruptcy could reduce product quality or prevent future interactions with the bankrupt firm. On average, 38% of consumers are aware of major bankruptcies. Using our experiments to estimate a structural model, we show that these indirect costs of bankruptcy amount to 12% to 15% of a firm's value. We show that these costs are unlikely to arise before bankruptcy.

Robust Predictive Modeling Under Unseen Data Distribution Shifts: A Methodological Commentary

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Information Systems Research
Predictive models are widely used to support decision making, yet they are typically built assuming that future data will follow the same distribution as the training data. In practice, data distributions often change in unseen ways, leading to poor model performance and reduced reliability. This methodological commentary highlights the risks of unseen data distribution shifts and shows how they are frequently overlooked in predictive modeling practice. Drawing on transfer learning, domain generalization, and distributionally robust optimization, we organize existing approaches to handling data shifts and illustrate how uncertainty-aware modeling can be implemented in practice. We conclude with actionable recommendations to guide the design, evaluation, and use of predictive models in uncertain data environments. Our work has implications for policy and practice related to trustworthy and responsible artificial intelligence (AI), predictive modeling, and AI risk management.

Accent Discrimination in Entrepreneurial Fundraising

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
Accent is a powerful, yet still socially acceptable, basis of discrimination that shapes interpersonal evaluations and access to opportunities, potentially disadvantaging entrepreneurs seeking funding. Bridging role congruity theory with sociolinguistic literature, we hypothesize that entrepreneurs whose regional accents align with the stereotypical entrepreneur are more likely to secure funding. We test this hypothesis in entrepreneurial pitching contexts using an observational study and two pre-registered experiments that manipulate entrepreneurs’ accents in pitch videos through a professional voice actor and AI. Across the UK, Italy, and the United States, the results support our hypothesis, providing robust evidence of accent-based discrimination in entrepreneurial fundraising.

Startup Evaluations with Generative Artificial Intelligence: An Exploratory Study on Early-Stage Investments and Survival Predictions by Large Language Models

2026-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
We examine the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in evaluating early-stage ventures. In pre-registered experiments, we prompt selected LLMs to generate investment evaluations and survival predictions for an archival dataset of 171 new venture pitches under systematically varied information cues. We compare these LLM-generated evaluations with realized fundraising outcomes, post-campaign survival rates, and evaluations provided by a benchmark sample of human investors. LLMs show strong capabilities in mirroring real fundraising outcomes. In contrast, their apparent accuracy in predicting venture survival largely reflects prior exposure to some ventures’ digital footprints rather than genuine reasoning under uncertainty. Providing LLMs with scientific, contextual, and social information cues can improve their evaluations, but can also activate human-like heuristics, including anchoring and herding. Our study highlights LLMs’ potential in venture evaluations while cautioning that unobserved influences can mislead interpretations of their capabilities.

Debt Maturity Management

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
This paper studies how a borrower issues long- and short-term debt in response to shocks to the fundamental value. Short-term debt protects creditors from future dilution and incentivizes the borrower to reduce leverage after small negative shocks. Long-term debt postpones default and allows the borrower time to recover after large negative shocks. When borrowers are in distress, they rely on short-term debt; however, they issue both types of debt during more normal periods. Our model generates novel implications for the dynamic adjustment of debt maturities. (JEL G32, G33)

Risk Managers in Banks

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
Some bank regulators require that performance bonuses for risk managers (RMs) and for employees in front offices (FOs) be linked to distinct performance metrics, as correlated pay incentives could lead RMs to rubber-stamp risky investments. We theoretically show that a positive correlation between FOs and RMs is optimal for banks, but can be socially excessive in leveraged institutions. Using data from German bank employees, we show empirically that incentive pay is indeed positively correlated between RMs and FOs. Consistent with our predictions, bonus correlations are higher in banks with higher leverage and weaker performance during the Great Financial Crisis.

Green patenting and voluntary innovation disclosure

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Accounting Studies
We investigate whether green innovators voluntarily provide innovation disclosure to reduce processing costs for stakeholders and gain green-specific disclosure benefits. We observe that green patenting firms provide more innovation disclosure in conference calls than do other innovating peers, controlling for patent value. Using a patent-call unit of analysis, we also provide within-firm evidence that managers highlight their green inventions more on conference calls relative to their other inventions. Green innovators provide more innovation disclosure when the costs of processing patent information are higher and anticipated disclosure benefits are greater. We find some evidence that innovation disclosure is positively associated with green fund ownership and stronger market responses to conference calls as well as proxies for ESG-related reputation. Our findings highlight both capital market and social capital benefits as motivating forces for voluntary innovation disclosure and suggest the nature of a firm’s innovations can impact its information environment.

EXPRESS: The Online Election Campaign Planning Problem: Optimizing Election Campaign Strategies with Inaccurate Information

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
Effective management of election campaigns involves dynamic decision-making under uncertainty. Traditional approaches rely heavily on pre-planned strategies that often fail to adapt to real-time changes in voter sentiment and external factors. This paper introduces the Online Election Campaign Planning Problem (OECPP) to optimize the scheduling of campaign activities in the context of U.S. presidential elections. OECPP incorporates sequentially updated predictions that represent assessments of the impact of campaign activities over the course of the campaign. Since these predictions evolve in response to new information and their accuracy cannot be fully assessed without perfect information, we develop deterministic and randomized online algorithms for OECPP that can operate effectively under unreliable and evolving predictions.We evaluate the performance of our algorithms using the competitive ratio (CR), a metric particularly useful when probabilistic modeling is impractical. We begin by establishing a tight upper bound on the CR of the online algorithms for the OECPP under unreliable reward predictions. We then introduce a sequential setup-based CR metric to capture the value of reoptimization as new predictions arrive, and we design deterministic and randomized algorithms that are optimal under this metric. Using data from U.S. presidential elections, we show that randomized online algorithms can significantly outperform their deterministic counterparts in terms of empirical CR. We also find that the effectiveness of randomized algorithms is driven by two factors: the selection of prediction samples for generating activity scenarios and the randomization cut-off, which determines the scenarios to be randomized. The benefit of randomization is nonmonotonic, and the best empirical CR is achieved by selectively adding prediction samples to the randomization set.

Tertius Dolens : Interalter Conflict and Its Negative Impact on Broker Performance

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Organization Science
Prior research on the relationship between network brokerage and firms’ innovation performance has predominantly portrayed the brokering firm as a tertius gaudens, or “the benefiting third,” which gains informational and coordination advantages from its network position by bridging disconnected and relationally neutral partner firms. We extend this view by theorizing a disadvantaged brokering firm, or broker, which spans two uncooperative partners, or alters, engaged in active conflict with one another. Described as a tertius dolens, or “the suffering third,” this broker occupies a position in which interalter conflict transforms brokerage from a structural advantage into a liability by constraining knowledge exchange, increasing coordination costs, and damaging the broker’s network reputation, thereby reducing innovation performance. We further argue that these adverse effects can be partly mitigated by structural conditions that restore balance to the broker’s position, including access to conflict-free structural holes, higher network status, and multiplex relational commitments with the conflicting alters. Using longitudinal data on 2,735 publicly listed biopharmaceutical firms and their vertical alliances from 2000 to 2009, combined with U.S. patent infringement lawsuits to capture interorganizational conflict, we find strong empirical support for these arguments. Taken together, our findings refine brokerage theory by identifying conflict among a broker’s alters as a hidden source of structural disadvantage and clarifying why brokers do not always realize the innovation benefits predicted by the tertius gaudens logic.Supplemental Material: The online supplementary material is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.19168 .

Observational Learning and Information Disclosure in Search Markets

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
We develop and estimate a structural model of buyers’ observational learning, search, and bidding, using unique data on in-person home viewings and transactions. We use the estimated model to quantify the welfare impact of different information disclosure rules. Our findings indicate that prohibiting the disclosure of home viewing information while permitting only the disclosure of time-on-market would extend the sale time and raise the transaction price, benefiting sellers but harming buyers on average.This paper was accepted by Raphael Thomadsen, marketing.Funding: Z. Fan gratefully acknowledges financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72533006]. X. Weng gratefully acknowledges funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72225001, 72561160161, and 72192843], as well as from the Wuhan East Lake High-Tech Development Zone (also known as the Optics Valley of China, or OVC) National Comprehensive Experimental Base for Governance of Intelligent Society. L.-A. Zhou gratefully acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 72192844].Supplemental Material: The data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00917 .

Dealer Funding and Market Liquidity

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
We analyze a model where dealers provide market liquidity by intermediating trades between clients. They exert unobservable search effort to improve intermediation profit. This moral-hazard friction limits their ability to raise external finance and compete with each other, constraining market liquidity even for safe assets and more so for those with higher search costs. Dealers mitigate this friction by using debt financing and intermediating across multiple markets, making leverage endogenous and linked to liquidity variations in otherwise unrelated markets. Capping leverage reduces dealer external financing and has mixed effects on welfare. It worsens liquidity but encourages effort. Our findings illuminate how postcrisis regulations impact bond market liquidity.This paper was accepted by William Cong, finance.Funding: J. C.-F. Kuong gratefully acknowledges the financial support from INSEAD and HKIMR.Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02278 .

Will the Truth Free Us from Misinformation?

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
We study the impact of truthful revelation mechanisms, like fact checking, on the incentives for media outlets to produce misinformation. The existing literature suggests that such interventions will always reduce this incentive. In this paper, we consider a context in which consumers benefit both, and to varying degrees, from the truth contained in news reports and from sharing, discussing, and reacting to news stories that, independent of their truthful content, reinforce and enhance their social identity. In such a setting, we find that truthful revelation will not always decrease, and may in fact increase, the incentives for biased reporting. We identify two distinct mechanisms behind this effect. First, we show that truthful revelation may improve the ability of a biased media outlet to signal its type to consumers. Second, we find that heterogeneous preferences for misinformation endow the outlet with a demand function that may imply an increase or decrease in the incentives to produce biased news due to the stochasticity implied by the fact checking process. Finally, we provide two empirical examples that offer results that are consistent with the idea that media outlets are unlikely to reduce, and may increase, bias when they expect the truth to be revealed imminently.This paper was accepted by Raphael Thomadsen, marketing.Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03896 .

EXPRESS: Communication Patterns in Joint Decision-Making

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing Research
Communication is a key aspect of the joint decision-making process, yet the field lacks an understanding of how people talk to each other while making joint decisions. In the present research, we analyzed nearly two hundred joint decision conversations from shop-along observations. We found that joint decision conversations are composed of four distinct communication patterns, which characterize how partners talk to each other: (1) coordination (including inquiry and disclosure), (2) contrast (including persuasion and devil’s advocate), (3) build, and (4) one-sided. We then used these communication patterns as the building blocks of joint decision conversations to quantitatively model how communication patterns dynamically flow while partners shop together, finding that decision partners navigate the decision lifecycle non-linearly and the usage of the communication patterns affects immediate satisfaction outcomes. Our findings enabled us to draw connections across the splintered literatures on dyadic communication. We develop a taxonomy that reflects an integrated, cross-disciplinary phenomenological understanding of each communication pattern to facilitate interdisciplinary research. Theoretical advancements and practical implications are discussed, as are areas for future research.

Exploitation or Exploration? Innovation Strategy in Response to Rivals' M&A

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Management Studies
This paper investigates the impact of rivals' Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) activities on the innovation orientation of firms that are not directly involved in these transactions, hereafter referred to as focal firms. Drawing on the Awareness‐Motivation‐Capability (AMC) framework, we find that rivals' M&A activities positively affect a focal firm's exploratory innovation, while negatively influencing its exploitative innovation, a dynamic that is predominantly driven by rival firms acting as acquirers. We further identify key boundary conditions that moderate this relationship and find that the influence of rival acquirers is amplified when their M&A deals are exploitative in nature, suggesting that focal firms respond strategically by differentiating through exploration. In addition, high levels of market competition intensify the positive effect of rival acquirers on focal firms' exploratory innovation. Finally, focal firms with greater financial slack are more likely to shift their innovation orientation towards exploration in response to rivals' M&A. Together, our findings reveal how external strategic moves by rivals can trigger forward‐looking innovation responses and highlight the importance of firm capabilities and market context in shaping these dynamics.

Different Aspirations, Different Directions: A Behavioural Perspective on Negative Performance Discrepancy and Problemistic Search

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Management Studies
Although the behavioural theory of the firm (BTOF) literature argues that negative performance discrepancy triggers problemistic search, whether and how negative social versus historical performance discrepancy differ in their impact on such search—and how managers prioritize between these two aspirations—remains unclear. Drawing on the BTOF and temporal focus literature, we posit that negative social performance discrepancy leads to an increase in search scope, while negative historical performance discrepancy leads to an increase in search depth. We further find that CEO temporal focus moderates these relationships: the link between negative social performance discrepancy and search scope is stronger under CEOs high in present focus, whereas the link between negative historical performance discrepancy and search depth is stronger under CEOs high in past focus. Our findings contribute to the BTOF literature by clarifying the distinct roles of historical and social aspirations in problemistic search and by incorporating temporal focus in performance feedback studies.

Parenthood and CEO Responses to Media Criticism on Pay

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Management Studies
Research on media coverage of controversial corporate practices typically suggests firms respond instrumentally to mitigate stakeholder reactions. However, we argue that CEOs' moral concerns can sometimes override strategic considerations, because media criticism may expose them to scrutiny from personally valued audiences – for instance, their own children. As moral role models, parent CEOs may become more willing to accept lower compensation to avoid negative scrutiny. To test our theory, we study media reports on CEO overcompensation. We hypothesize that media criticism of pay arrangements increases parent CEOs' willingness to accept lower pay relative to peers when their parental identity is salient. We test this hypothesis in two studies. The first, an observational study using a hand‐collected biographic dataset, provides suggestive evidence consistent with our hypothesis: when parenthood is a salient identity, media criticism is marginally associated with lower subsequent CEO pay relative to peers. The second, an experimental survey of executives and directors, offers suggestive evidence that activating respondents' parental identity marginally increases their willingness to forgo compensation and to support a less generous remuneration package.

Customer Mistreatment Among Frontline Staff in Social Care: Supporting Employees Through HRM Practices

2026-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Human Resource Management
The social care sector across the globe is increasingly witnessing customer mistreatment incidents that pose significant personal and work‐related challenges for frontline employees. Extant research suggests that human resource management (HRM) can be instrumental in extending support to the frontline to overcome the adversities of such mistreatment. In this study, we first develop a comprehensive account of the types of customer mistreatment prevalent in social care. Then, drawing on psychological contract theory, we outline the frontline's expectations of support from HRM practices to deal with such incidents. We further elaborate on gaps in social care that inhibit extending such support through HRM practices to the frontline and establish how the HR co‐creation approach can be utilized to plug these gaps. In this multistage qualitative study, we collect data in three stages from 51 frontline employees and 15 HR professionals working in the social care sector who have witnessed customer mistreatment. Based on our study's findings, we propose a novel framework called “FRESH against mistreatment” (Frontline Expectations for Support from HRM), which can aid HR professionals in identifying expectations, gaps, and possibilities for extending support through HRM practices to the frontline in social care to handle incidents of customer mistreatment.

Social comparison and the value of performance trajectory information: A field experiment in the workplace

2026-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
Many new employees leave their firms before realizing the returns to experience. One reason is that they cannot see how performance evolves with tenure. We study whether making performance trajectories visible improves retention and firm performance. In a randomized controlled trial at a multinational spa chain in China, workers received twice‐weekly information for 28 weeks about the performance path of a high‐performing senior coworker. The intervention reduces new‐worker attrition by 11–12% and increases revenue by 15% in stores with more new workers. These effects are largely driven by reduced stress and improved mental health, as the information lowers their beliefs about how well senior coworkers performed early in their careers. By contrast, showing only the current performance of a similar‐tenure peer has no detectable effect.Managerial SummaryIn many firms, new employees leave before realizing the returns to experience because they lack information about how performance evolves with tenure. We examine whether making senior workers’ performance trajectories visible improves retention and firm performance. In a randomized controlled trial involving over 7,000 workers at a multinational spa chain in China, employees received twice‐weekly information for 28 weeks about the performance trajectory of a high‐performing senior coworker. The intervention reduces new‐worker attrition by 11–12% and increases revenue by 15% in stores with more new workers. These effects are driven by reduced stress and improved mental health, as the information lowers beliefs about senior coworkers’ early‐career performance. Overall, our findings show that making senior workers’ performance trajectories visible can mitigate social comparison costs within firms.

Information‐seeking lobbying and strategic stockpiling under trade policy uncertainty

2026-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
This study investigates how firms engage in information‐seeking lobbying to address trade policy uncertainty. I argue that lobbying enables firms to gain early insights into forthcoming tariff actions, allowing them to strategically stockpile products likely to be targeted. Using shipping records of US firms during the 2018 US–China trade war, I find that lobbying firms increased imports of soon‐to‐be‐tariffed products before tariff lists were publicly released, compared to non‐lobbying firms. This selective stockpiling pattern disappeared after tariff announcements. Further analysis shows that lobbying firms were less likely to request tariff exemptions for products they had preemptively stockpiled, suggesting that information‐seeking lobbying during policy formulation provides an additional benefit by reducing the need for costly government engagement during the implementation phase.Managerial SummaryTo manage heightened trade policy uncertainty, firms often adjust global supply chains or engage with the government—but how can they integrate these strategies? This study proposes that firms can engage in lobbying not just to influence policy outcomes, but to gain early insights into pending trade actions. Using data from the 2018 US–China trade war, I find that lobbying firms stockpiled more of the products that were later targeted by tariffs before those tariffs were publicly announced. These firms were also less likely to request tariff exemptions for products they had preemptively stockpiled, indicating potential cost savings by avoiding expensive government engagement. The findings underscore the strategic value of early‐stage lobbying and highlight the importance of coordination between government affairs and operation departments.

Excess Commitment in R&D

2026-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
We document that firms exhibit “excess” commitment to R&D projects and examine its consequences for innovation outcomes. Using detailed data on pharmaceutical firms’ clinical trial projects, we find that trial delays, empirically uncorrelated with multiple project-quality measures, substantially reduce firms’ subsequent project-termination propensity. This result remains robust when we use variation in clinical trial site congestion to instrument for unexpected delays. Excess commitment intensifies when CEO compensation has greater stock-price sensitivity and the CEO is responsible for the project’s initiation. Our findings have broader implications: delay-driven commitment reduces new drug project initiations, with further evidence suggesting efficiency losses for firms.

Tail Optimality and Performance Analysis of the Nudge*(M) Scheduling Algorithm

2026-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Operations Research
Many systems traditionally use a basic first-come, first-served scheduling policy. It is simple to implement and perceived as fair to arriving jobs. In recent years, Nudge policies were introduced, showing that large delays occur less frequently by allowing small changes in the order in which jobs are served—often improving all delay quantiles. In “Tail Optimality and Performance Analysis of the Nudge*(M) Scheduling Algorithm,” Charlet and Van Houdt introduce the Nudge*(M) policy and show that this policy is optimal among a broad class of Nudge-like policies. A key feature of these policies is that they do not exploit arrival time information, only the arrival order and job labels. The authors provide an explicit formula for the asymptotic tail improvement ratio and show how to numerically find the waiting and response time distributions.

A Vision Editorial for the 2026–2029 JMR Team

2026-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing Research
This article is temporarily under embargo.

EXPRESS: Vocal Similarity, Timbre, and Persuasion in Consumer-Spokesperson Interactions

2026-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing Research
Consumers are more easily persuaded by people who are similar to them in looks, behavior, and beliefs. Does similarity’s effect on persuasion extend to similarity in how people sound? We explore how similarity in vocal timbre influences consumer choice. Using machine learning, we generate an objective measure of vocal similarity between an individual consumer and a spokesperson using mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) to capture vocal timbre. First, using data from 7,002 entrepreneur-investor combinations in Shark Tank, we demonstrate the effect of vocal similarity on persuasion in investment pitches. Then, in 2,091 Kickstarter campaigns, we show that a spokesperson’s voice closer to a large audience’s average voice results in higher persuasion, measured by fundraised amount and campaign success – a result driven by vocal similarity. Moreover, these effects are attenuated when external signals of campaign credibility are present. Finally, in four laboratory studies, we show that vocal similarity with a spokesperson or recommender leads to greater trust in their competence and positively influences persuasion. We also show that objective and subjective voice similarity have similar results, with objective similarity mapping on to subjective similarity. We provide a deeper understanding of consumer-spokesperson interactions, including new tools for vocal analytics.

Brief Commentary: A Framework for Detecting AI Agents in Online Research

2026-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Consumer Research
Online behavioral research assumes survey responses come from humans, yet vision-enabled AI agents can now autonomously complete surveys by capturing screenshots, processing questions, and submitting responses. Because these agents perceive the same rendered visual content that humans see, traditional detection methods are ineffective. This article introduces the Cognitive Trap Framework: researchers can transform architectural constraints of vision-language models into survey questions where the correct answers are simultaneously difficult for AI agents but easily processed by humans. Six traps derived from computer science benchmarks demonstrate the framework. Against 1,007 human participants (Prolific) and 526 researcher-deployed AI agents (e.g., ChatGPT Agent, Google Project Mariner), cognitive traps detected 97.1% of agents (vs. 2.3% with traditional attention checks), while flagging only 4.1% of humans. Pre-registered replications on Amazon MTurk and CloudResearch Connect demonstrate cross-platform effectiveness, and validation against 34 frontier models spanning two years reveals that model improvement is non-monotonic because each new architecture reconfigures which constraints it resolves and which it introduces. The framework can thus generate new cognitive traps as AI agent models evolve, and a public repository provides researchers with validated traps ready for deployment.

How Financial Markets Create Superstars

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
By aggregating information into stock prices, financial markets help guide the allocation of resources. We show that speculators without information about firms’ fundamentals can exploit this role of prices and profit from inflating firm valuations. Uninformed speculation is profitable because high valuations attract employees, business partners, and investors, creating value at targeted firms at the cost of diverting resources from better firms. Both large and small speculators, without pre-existing stock positions, can profit from uninformed speculation, particularly when targeting firms with moderate Q, operating in “normal” (neither hot nor cold) markets, and using performance pay or equity to attract stakeholders.

The Covenant-Defeasance Option in Corporate Bonds

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
Corporate bonds include restrictive covenants that may prevent firms from pursuing valuable growth opportunities ex post and are virtually impossible to renegotiate. We study a common but little-known contractual provision—the defeasance option—which allows issuers to immediately remove all covenants without retiring the bond. Our theoretical model predicts, and our empirical analysis confirms, that defeasance inclusion is more likely when covenants are numerous and issuers face financial constraints, uncertainty, and growth opportunities. We also show that investors require lower yields when defeasance is included in noncallable bonds, and higher yields in fixed-price callable bonds, where it raises call risk. (JEL G32, D86, G12)

The Broader Role of Venture Capital Due Diligence

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
Analyzing approximately 2,000 applicants to a U.K. seed fund, this study examines how venture capital (VC) due diligence affects startup outcomes independent of funding decisions. Leveraging random reviewer assignment, we find that due diligence increases 2-year growth but lowers continuation rates among nonfunded applicants, reflecting a dynamic of accelerated scaling or exit. Evidence points to a learning mechanism: due diligence exposes founders to advanced website technologies, prompting capability building in digital skills. Firms selected for due diligence adopt these technologies, even before raising external capital. The findings highlight VC due diligence as a formative process influencing startups beyond the funded few.

Behind Closed Doors: The Uncommunal Feminine Stereotype

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Organization Science
Theories of gender inequality in the workplace rely heavily on stereotypes that describe women as more communal (e.g., warm and kind) and less agentic (e.g., assertive and forceful) than men. In this paper, we highlight the existence of an uncommunal feminine stereotype wherein women are also believed to be more conniving and devious than men, pursuing their personal goals at the expense of others. To explain how this uncommunal stereotype can coexist with its communal counterpart, we posit that women are believed to behave more communally in public and more uncommunally in private. This public-private distinction can reconcile conflicting stereotypes of women’s communality and better account for aspects of inequality. In particular, the uncommunal stereotype provides an alternative attribution for women’s success when it occurs, explains the greater vigilance to and sanctioning of women’s unethical behavior, and strengthens backlash theory by better explaining why successful women are distrusted. In these ways and others, accounting for the uncommunal feminine stereotype can enhance gender theory.

A Bayesian Dual Clustering Approach for Selecting Data and Parameter Granularities

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Marketing Science
We propose a Bayesian dual clustering method that infers both data and parameter granularities.

The Demand for Government Debt

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
We document that the sectoral composition and marginal buyers of government debt differ notably across jurisdictions and over time. We use instrumental variables derived from monetary policy surprises to estimate the demand elasticities of various sectors. In the United States, commercial banks and mutual funds exhibit the most price-elastic demand, whereas the foreign official sector has a price-inelastic demand. Based on these estimates and under certain assumptions, we find that a 1% increase in the Central Bank holdings of U.S. Treasuries results in an around 8- to 13-basis-point drop in long-term yields depending on the market composition. Elasticities of individual sectors do not differ in a statistically significant manner when the Central Bank share in the Treasury market increases or decreases. However, different market compositions during various quantitative easing (QE) and quantitative tightening (QT) programs have led to an asymmetric effect with the impact of QE on yields being greater than that of QT. Our results suggest that, overall, the demand for U.S. Treasuries is considerably more elastic than for equities, corporate bonds, and emerging market sovereign bonds found in the literature. We also repeat the analysis for other jurisdictions and compare estimates for different sectors.This paper was accepted by Lukas Schmid, finance.Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2025.00332 .

How Do Investors React to Supplier Exploitation? Event Study and Experimental Evidence

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Operations Management
Supplier exploitation, including financial squeezing, payment delays, and non‐contractual demands, is a pervasive form of corporate misconduct. This multi‐method study examines how investors interpret supplier exploitation amid competing ethical and financial considerations. Using an event study of 233 enforcement actions by the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC), we find a significant negative investor reaction, with firms losing an average of 1.24% in market value. This negative market reaction is stronger for firms receiving greater media attention but weaker for more profitable buyers. To explore the underlying behavioral mechanisms, we conduct an incentivized vignette experiment with experienced investors. The experiment reveals that anticipated public moral judgment (viewing exploitation as wrongful) and profit‐driven considerations (viewing exploitation as rational misconduct) jointly shape investor reactions. Specifically, buyer profitability tips the balance by reducing the weight placed on moral concerns while increasing the emphasis on financial considerations. Supplemented by practitioner interviews, this study provides novel evidence on the overall negative, yet complex economic consequences of supplier exploitation.

Received! How Acknowledgment Increases a Company’s Sustainability Image and Drives Repeat Customer Participation in Take-Back Programs

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Consumer Research
An increasing number of companies offer take-back programs, collecting used products or materials from consumers to sustainably process them through recycling or reusing. Prior research examines how to bolster company sustainability perceptions and initially engage customers in take-back programs, but are there additional actions companies can take to enhance their sustainability image and encourage repeat customer participation? We theorize that when a company simply acknowledges customers’ participation in its take-back program, it increases customers’ emotional attachment and partnership with the company. Subsequently, customers perceive the company as more sustainable and are also more likely to participate in the company’s take-back program again. These effects are demonstrated in seven studies, including a field study with actual repeat participation. We show that the acknowledgment effect is stronger for take-back programs than for company-beneficial programs and that it operates through distinct mechanisms within the take-back context. We also find that the consumer characteristic of self-brand connection dilutes the acknowledgment effect, and the industry characteristic of greenwashing attenuates the benefits of acknowledgment, consistent with the emotional attachment and partnership mechanisms. This research provides theoretical insights into partnerships and offers substantive implications for managers as more companies launch take-back programs.

Equity by Design: A Positive Organizational Scholarship Approach to Human Resource‐Artificial Intelligence Systems Design

2026-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Human Resource Management
In today's polarized sociopolitical climate, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts increasingly face backlash, with equity in particular becoming marginalized in both scholarly and practitioner discourse despite its central importance for ensuring fair allocation of opportunities and resources across the employee lifecycle. These concerns are magnified as human resource (HR) decisions become increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence (AI), which shifts the locus of equity from individual judgment to systems design. In this paper, we introduce the concept of HR‐AI systems design, defined as the intentional planning and configuration of AI tools that support core HR functions in ways that reflect and embed focal organizational values. More specifically, we focus on equitable HR‐AI systems design, which concerns the design of AI‐mediated HR systems in which equity considerations are embedded in their underlying logics, evaluative criteria, and decision processes. Drawing on positive organizational scholarship (POS), we develop a values‐based framework for equitable HR‐AI systems design grounded in three core elements: a strengths‐based orientation, justice as a virtuous value, and high‐quality connections as a relational principle. These POS‐informed design elements can redirect dominant merit‐based, optimization‐based, and homophily‐based biasing logics embedded in existing HR‐AI systems toward more equitable outcomes. This paper contributes to DEI scholarship by theorizing equity as a designable systems feature, advances research on AI in HR by identifying equity‐oriented design logics, and extends POS scholarship to digitally mediated organizational contexts.

Incentivizing Effort and Informing Investment: The Dual Role of Stock Prices

2026-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
Stock prices aggregate investor information about investment opportunities and reflect managerial performance. These dual roles may be in tension: when prices are more informative about investment opportunities, they may be less effective at incentivizing managerial effort. This tradeoff has novel consequences. Lower information costs can lead to both more efficient investment but lower firm value. The principal may strictly prefer to delegate investment to a manager who has no informational advantage and makes ex-post inefficient choices. Investment in diversifying and (ex-ante) negative NPV projects mitigate agency problems. Finally, standard measures of price efficiency provide an incomplete picture of firm value. (JEL D8, G1)

The Effects of Gender Integration on Men: Evidence from the U.S. Military

2026-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S.: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We exploit the staggered integration of women into combat units to estimate the causal effects of the introduction of female colleagues on men’s job performance, behavior, and perceptions of workplace quality, using monthly administrative personnel records and rich survey responses. We find that integrating women into previously all-male units does not negatively affect men’s performance or behavioral outcomes, including retention, promotions, demotions, separations for misconduct, criminal investigations, and medical conditions. Most of our results are precise enough to rule out small detrimental effects. However, there is a wedge between men’s perceptions and performance. The integration of women causes a negative shift in male soldiers’ perceptions of workplace quality. The decline is driven by units integrated with female officers, likely arising from female officers increasing men’s awareness of workplace problems or from men’s dissatisfaction from working with women in positions of authority—even though men in such units show some performance gains. If male-dominated workplaces are reluctant to incorporate women due to expectations that men will become less productive, our paper provides evidence to weigh against that notion.

Internal Versus Market Pay References in Knowledge-Intensive Firms

2026-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Organization Science
How do firms balance market competitiveness with internal cohesion when setting employee pay? We examine this question using confidential compensation data on 19 million U.S. employees across 479 firms varying in knowledge intensity. We construct precise pay reference groups: internal benchmarks based on skill-equivalent peers across functions and market benchmarks based on same occupation, skill level, and region at other firms. We find that in low knowledge-intensity firms, pay is equally sensitive to both internal and market benchmarks, whereas in high knowledge-intensity firms, pay becomes decoupled from market forces and aligns with internal benchmarks. Internal pay alignment also increases following chief executive officer transitions that prioritize innovation. These patterns are driven by high-skilled employees in roles requiring complex problem-solving and collaboration. Moreover, firms with greater internal pay alignment generate more patents, including breakthrough innovations. Altogether, our findings reveal that although some firms maintain close market alignment, knowledge-intensive firms appear to decouple pay from market forces. This is particularly the case for their skilled workers, consistent with firms prioritizing internal social dynamics in contexts where complex problem-solving and collaboration are important for value creation.Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2024.19959 .

Positioning in Digital Markets: A Demand-Side View

2026-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Organization Science
This paper proposes that firms’ positioning in digital markets involves offering combinations of core and peripheral product functions that add value to customers. When new entrants face demand uncertainty and seek positions that match customer needs and preferences, they draw on external market feedback, specifically customer evaluations of other products, as an input to their positioning decisions. Using data on Photo & Video mobile applications in the Apple App Store, we theorize and show that two dimensions of external market feedback—overall customer dissatisfaction and customer evaluation heterogeneity—convey distinct information about the demand environment. These cues shape whether entrants position as generalists combining multiple functions or as specialists that concentrate on a core function, as well as the extent to which they differentiate from existing competitive products. Our results show that higher customer dissatisfaction is associated with greater focus on the core function and stronger differentiation in the peripheral functions. On the other hand, higher customer evaluation heterogeneity is associated with reduced focus on the core function and greater imitation in peripheral functions. This study contributes to the emerging literature on firm strategies in digital markets by identifying external market feedback as a key driver of product variety and positioning. It also advances a demand-side view of market entry by demonstrating how entrants use broad market signals to manage demand uncertainty when choosing their initial positions.Funding: This work was supported by the INSEAD [Research & Development Funds] and the Strategic Management Society [SRF Dissertation Research Grant 2018].Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.17112 .

EXPRESS: Death or Muerte? Effects of Sales Language Use on the Consumption of Death-Related Products and Services

2026-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing Research
Consumers often resist marketing information about death-related products and services (DRPS), let alone purchase them. Yet, there is a massive market and universal necessity for DRPS offerings like life insurance and funeral services. Proactively considering DRPS in advance allows consumers to better prepare for death and its aftermath. The current research builds on terror management theory and the literature on language use and psychological distance to propose a language-based sales communication strategy for DRPS. The findings from eight studies, including two field experiments and an eye-tracking study, indicate that DRPS sales messages appear in consumers’ second (vs. native) language (e.g., usingmuerte, Spanish for death, when talking to a native English speaker whose second language is Spanish) decreases consumers’ fear of death by creating greater psychological distance to death, which in turn induces more consumption (e.g., actual purchases). However, this effect becomes attenuated when consumers perceive high control over death or when the DRPS feature transcendence after death. In contrast, the effect is amplified for DRPS that require an intermediate level of customer participation. These findings offer novel insights into how marketers and policymakers can motivate consumers to consider DRPS earlier and engage in more proactive decision-making.

EXPRESS: Political Ideology Shapes Consumer Responses to Addictive Products

2026-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing
Consumption of addictive products, such as gambling, alcohol, tobacco, gaming, fast food, and illicit drugs, are an important public health and policy issue. Research identifies that political ideology influences positive consumer behaviors, but little is known about whether political ideology shapes negative consumer behavior. Through a ten study multi-method investigation including a large correlational study, field study, and eight online studies (including six experiments), the authors reveal the relationship between political ideology and consumer responses to addictive products. Results indicate that political conservatism, as opposed to liberalism, is associated with more favorable consumer attitudes, intentions, and behavior towards addictive products, due to a stronger sense of agency, which reduces perceptions of product danger. The findings show that the positive relationship between political conservatism, sense of agency, perceived product danger, and subsequent responses to addictive products can be attenuated through exposure to personally directed threat appeals (i.e., threat messages with second-person pronouns). This research advances political ideology research in marketing by demonstrating how it shapes responses to addictive products and provides practical ways to shift its potential harmful effects.

EXPRESS: Designing with Edge Consumers: How Inclusive Design Orientation Transforms New Product Development

2026-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing
Industry leaders and academics recognize the importance of addressing the needs of edge consumers – those who are underserved or unserved in a marketplace. Yet little is known about how organizations transform their new product development (NPD) processes to create inclusive products. Adopting a theories-in-use approach, we draw on interviews with industry experts, combined with secondary data, to develop grounded insights on how inclusion can be embedded in NPD. We introduce Inclusive Design Orientation (IDO), which we define as the extent to which members of an organization share the belief that designing with a diverse set of consumers’ needs in mind is an organizational imperative and engage in product design and development practices consistent with that belief. IDO represents a novel organizational orientation that shifts firms from designing for the “average user” towards intentionally engaging edge users in the innovation process. Our framework identifies antecedent conditions that foster IDO, external and internal factors that enable or constrain IDO; and examines short- and long-term business outcomes. Our research develops organic theory by introducing IDO and offers a blueprint for NPD transformation by providing actionable insights to advance inclusive design and demonstrating how engaging edge consumers can fuel inclusive product innovation.

Applicant Reactions to Criminal History Hiring: Stereotype Processes, Diversity Rationale, and Individual Difference

2026-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Management
Given the recent evaluation and reduction of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in response to stakeholder concerns, we consider the context of applicant reactions to Fair Chance Hiring policies used to support the hiring of a stigmatized population: individuals with a criminal history. We draw on stigma and stereotyping literatures to examine non-stigmatized (those without a criminal history) applicants’ reactions to organizations’ use of Fair Chance Hiring language in recruitment. Specifically, we suggest that these third-party applicants will assign negative stereotypes to organizations with Fair Chance Hiring initiatives, subsequently impacting their job pursuit intentions. We also draw upon the diversity policy rationale literature to explore the effectiveness of moral and business case justifications in reducing negative stereotypes and increasing job pursuit intentions. Additionally, we consider an identity-based individual difference that qualifies these relationships. Through a vignette experiment and two behavioral experimental simulations exploring both active and passive job seekers, our results show that companies with Fair Chance Hiring policies are assigned higher levels of negative stereotypes, and that these stereotypes result in lower job pursuit intentions. However, using moral case (but not business case) justifications reduces applicants’ assignment of negative stereotypes to companies with these policies and improves applicants’ job pursuit intentions. In all, our results suggest that applicants’ negative stereotyping of organizations for upholding certain DEI policies is not inevitable; there are actionable approaches organizations can take to reduce negative reactions. Contributions and practical implications are discussed.

What makes an internationalizing firm entrepreneurial?

2026-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of International Business Studies
Zahra et al. (2024) argue that prior research has insufficient understanding of the entrepreneurial nature of internationalization. To address this, they integrate theories from management and international business to develop a firm-level typology that incorporates (1) the degree of radicalness of the firm’s entrepreneurial behavior and (2) the firm’s level of foreign market commitment. We advance these efforts by proposing that, to understand what makes an internationalizing firm entrepreneurial, researchers will also benefit from direct insights from entrepreneurship research. We retain Zahra et al.’s (2024) behavioral focus in our arguments but shift attention to the individuals that guide the firm’s pursuit of international opportunity, regardless of whether the firm is a new venture or an MNE. We also argue that, when compared to typologies, a process-based perspective is better suited to both differentiating firms and to understanding and explaining the dynamic nature of entrepreneurial internationalization behavior and outcomes.

Who Bears Flood Risk? Evidence from Mortgage Markets in Florida

2026-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
Government-provided flood insurance contracts have strict coverage limits, leaving some households underinsured against flood risk. This paper exploits these strict coverage limits as well as staggered flood map updates to show that mortgage lenders screen for uninsurable flood risk by requiring lower loan-to-value ratios at origination. This credit rationing leads delinquency rates to equalize inside and outside of flood zones, and shifts the composition of mortgage borrowers in flood zones toward richer and higher credit quality individuals. I conclude that lenders reduce credit supply when they retain residual uninsured exposures to flood risk, which has distributional consequences for flood zones.

The Response of Mortgage Supply to Expected Flood Insurance Lapses

2026-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
Flooding is among the costliest natural disasters in many countries. To protect collateral, many mortgage borrowers in the United States are legally required to maintain flood insurance. However, lax enforcement leads to frequent policy lapses. This paper shows that lenders provide credit contingent on borrowers’ insurance incentives. Exploiting exogenous premium rises ($266 annually) that disincentivize insurance take-up, I find mortgage denial rates dramatically increase by 0.49–0.81 pp. By comparison, lowering income by $266 has an effect of only 0.01 pp. Mortgage applicants’ composition remains unchanged, refuting demand-side explanations. Evidence suggests lenders internalize ex-post monitoring costs into ex-ante credit restrictions.

Controlling the narrative: managers’ topic-shifting behavior in conference calls

2026-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Accounting Studies
This study implements topical analysis to identify the extent to which managers shift their responses from analysts’ questions in earnings conference calls. We refer to this behavior as managerial topic-shifting. Using a sample of conference calls from 2002 to 2017, we find that managers in firms with better performance, more powerful CEOs, and a weaker information environment shift more from the topics of analysts’ inquiries. Managers are also more likely to shift topics when analysts’ questions display a more positive tone or lower specificity. Moreover, we find that managerial topic-shifting provides incremental information to capital markets by facilitating the incorporation of earnings information into stock prices. Our study documents a previously unexplored dimension of managerial disclosure strategy.

Why do critical audit matters lack teeth? Insights from auditors’ implementation experiences

2026-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Accounting Studies
The PCAOB adopted critical audit matters (CAMs) to meet public demand for informative audit disclosure, but stakeholders are concerned this goal has not been achieved. We explore this disconnect via interviews with 30 highly experienced auditors. We find that audit firms expended considerable resources to implement CAM best practices. However, overwhelming institutional pressure gave rise to informal rules of thumb that prioritize symbolic comfort over substantive change. The first isdon’t be an outlier, so auditors defer to the national office to ensure conformity and avoid PCAOB scrutiny. The second isreport the “right” number of CAMsby never reporting zero and reporting at least one recurring CAM. The third isavoid surprisesby communicating with the client to ensure that CAMs do not contain original information and allowing management to preempt auditor disclosures. Collectively, these rules yield CAMs that comply with PCAOB standards but do not provide new information and instead maintain the status quo.

Leadership Behaviors: A Synthesis of Schools of Thought

2026-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Management
We identify a divide between two schools of thought in leadership behavior research. The classical behavioral school (CBS) categorizes leadership behaviors based on their latent functions and meanings—task, relations, change, and moral—with the aim of achieving intersubjective agreement among evaluators. In contrast, the neo-behavioral school (NBS) focuses on the observable forms and manifestations of behavior—choices, embodiment, interactions, textual markers, and temporal patterns—in the pursuit of objective description. In this article, we conduct a metasynthesis to systematically describe, evaluate, and integrate these two schools. We identify their distinct research logics, showing that CBS categories enable cross-contextual generalization but conflate behavioral description with evaluative judgment, thereby risking causal indeterminacy and limiting actionability. Conversely, NBS approaches enable causally well-determined analyses of what leaders concretely do but risk reductionism and limited generalizability of meaning when studied in isolation. Building on this analysis, we identify school-specific best practices and distinguish limitations that can be mitigated within each school from those that require cross-school integration. We then develop an integrative framework that assigns distinct causal roles to concrete behavioral manifestations and to evaluations of their function and meaning, explicating how leadership behaviors acquire meaning across contexts and how CBS evaluations emerge as downstream consequences of NBS-specified behavioral aspects and various contextual factors. Finally, we propose a generative research agenda that advances leadership behavior research across schools of thought. The framework also has practical implications, enabling behaviorally grounded leadership development through actionable feedback, as well as more equitable and evidence-based leadership selection anchored in observable behavior.

Specialization in Banking

2026-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Journal of Finance
Using supervisory data on the loan portfolios of large U.S. banks, we document that these banks specialize by concentrating their lending disproportionately in a few industries. This specialization is consistent with banks having industry‐specific knowledge, reflected in reduced risk of loan defaults, lower aggregate charge‐offs, and higher propensity to lend to opaque firms in the preferred industry. Banks attract high‐quality borrowers by offering generous loan terms in their specialized industry, especially to borrowers with alternative options. Banks focus on their preferred industry in times of instability and relatively lower Tier 1 capital as well as after surges in deposits.

When creation and capture diverge: Why breakthrough inventions do not break through alike

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
Reserch SummaryBreakthrough inventions are central to firms' competitive advantage, yet what constitutes a breakthrough remains unclear. We examine the relationship between technological quality (measured by forward citations) and economic value (measured by grant‐day abnormal stock‐returns) of patents. Using U.S. patents assigned to publicly listed firms, we find that among the most exceptional inventions—that is, breakthroughs—the correlation between these two measures disappears: technologically outstanding patents are not necessarily the most economically valuable. We attribute this divergence to a structural tension between value creation and value capture in patenting, driven by novelty, the availability of complementary assets, and competitive dynamics. Firms that successfully manage both dimensions earn a disproportionate market premium. This outcome is often associated with firms that diversify their technological portfolios asynchronously across technology S‐curves.Managerial SummaryBreakthrough innovations are widely viewed as the lifeblood of corporate success. Yet what truly defines a breakthrough—and how its value should be assessed—remains unclear. Companies typically rely on two indicators: technological quality (measured by forward citations) and economic value (captured by stock market reactions at patent grant). Conventional wisdom assumes these move together. Our analysis of U.S. patents challenges this view. For the most exceptional inventions, technological quality and economic value diverge. We identify the drivers of this tension and show that firms able to manage it earn disproportionate market returns.

Families in venture capital

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Management Journal
This exploratory paper introduces a new type of family business by studying the investment strategies of family‐managed venture capital funds (“Family VCs”) across a multi‐country setting. It shows that Family VCs are more likely to invest in (syndicate with) geographically proximate startups (investors), indicating a preference for local investments. This tendency is stronger when the VC is named after the family and the family is closely involved in the decision‐making process of the fund. I provide suggestive evidence that this pattern reflects both superior local knowledge (rational response) and home bias (non‐rational response), with the latter becoming more pronounced when performance pressure is lower.Managerial SummaryFamily‐managed VC funds (Family VCs), managing roughly $29 billion, represent an important segment of the venture capital industry. I show that family control shapes both the selection of startups and syndicate partners. Family VCs are indeed more likely to support ventures and partner with investors from their communities, particularly when family members are highly involved in investment decisions and the fund is named after the family. I provide suggestive evidence that this local preference stems from both rational factors, like superior local knowledge and networks, and a non‐rational preference for local investments. Their local focus becomes relatively less pronounced when families must demonstrate strong financial performance, such as when a follow‐on fund has not yet been raised and during competitive market conditions.

Bond Convenience Yields in the Eurozone Currency Union

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
In a monetary union, the risk-free rate cannot adjust to country-level fiscal positions, leaving only default spreads and convenience yields to respond. Empirically, we find that convenience yields explain a large share of the variation in eurozone (EZ) sovereign bond yields. EZ sovereign bonds earn larger convenience yields when their governments run larger surpluses. Since convenience yields generate substantial seigniorage revenue from debt issuance, our estimates imply economically large fiscal costs from low convenience yields for peripheral countries in the EZ. (JEL E42, F33, G15)

Beliefs and Portfolios: Causal Evidence*

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Review of Financial Studies
We causally test alternative theories of expectation formation. Using a randomized information experiment we show overreaction is a key feature of individuals’ return expectations, and individuals’ response to the price-earnings ratio is opposite of academic consensus. Our evidence is inconsistent with standard models of expectation formation, but subjective mental models that deviate from objective benchmarks can jointly explain the updating behavior in the experiment, the link between individuals’ prior perceptions and expectations, and the heterogeneity of updating. Conditional on their beliefs, individuals’ sensitivity of equity shares in a hypothetical portfolio choice experiment is consistent with the standard Merton model.

Risk Minimization as a Framework for Online Allocation in Display Advertising

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Operations Research
“Risk Minimization as a Framework for Online Allocation in Display Advertising,” by Davood Shamsi, Robert Luenberger, and Yinyu Ye, revisits a foundational approach to real-time resource allocation. The study draws a conceptual bridge between earlier risk minimization models and more recent dual mirror descent methods, two influential paradigms in online optimization. Although both frameworks generate similar exponential price update rules, this research shows they arise from distinct modeling perspectives: one grounded in convex risk minimization and the other in Bregman divergence and mirror descent. By framing dual updates through a risk-aware lens, the authors recover widely used allocation strategies—including greedy, linear, and multiplicative weights—as special cases. The paper broadens the theoretical toolkit for online resource allocation and highlights how incorporating uncertainty directly into the optimization framework can yield flexible, interpretable, and robust algorithms across stochastic and adversarial settings.

Erratum to Online Allocation and Pricing: Constant Regret via Bellman Inequalities

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Operations Research
Theorem 3 of the paper Online Allocation and Pricing: Constant Regret via Bellman Inequalities (Operations Research 69(3):821–840) states a constant regret result for a menu-pricing problem. In this erratum, the authors correct the theorem’s proof.

Assortment and Price Optimization Under a Multiattribute (Contextual) Choice Model

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Operations Research
Context-Dependent Choice and Retail DecisionsTraditional assortment models assume that consumers evaluate products independently of the alternatives available (i.e., the “context”). In “Assortment and Price Optimization Under a Multiattribute (Contextual) Choice Model,” the authors challenge this assumption by analyzing assortment and pricing decisions under a context-dependent choice framework known as the contextual concavity (CC) model. The CC model incorporates reference dependence across multiple attributes, such as price and quality, and captures well-documented context effects, including compromise and decoy effects. The study makes several contributions. It characterizes the structure of optimal assortments under multiattribute loss aversion, develops a polynomial-size mixed-integer linear programming formulation for solving the general problem, and analyzes the joint assortment and pricing decision. Numerical experiments show that ignoring context effects, by relying on standard context-independent models such as the multinomial logit, can lead to substantial profit losses, with gaps ranging from 3% to 63%. These findings highlight the strategic importance of incorporating contextual effects into retail decisions.

Dynamic Programming in Ordered Vector Space

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Operations Research
Dynamic Programming in Ordered Vector Space

The Voting Premium

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Journal of Finance
We develop a unified theory of blockholder governance and the voting premium in a setting without takeovers or controlling shareholders. A voting premium emerges when a minority blockholder can influence shareholder composition by accumulating votes and buying shares from dissenting shareholders. Our theory reconciles conflicting empirical findings by showing that standard measures of the voting premium often misrepresent the true value of voting rights, increased conflicts between the blockholder and small shareholders do not necessarily raise the voting premium, and the voting premium can even turn negative when small shareholders free‐ride on the blockholder's trades.

Forget Me If You Can: Auditing User Data Revocation in Recommendation Systems

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Information Systems Research
Research Spotlight: Auditing the “Right to Be Forgotten” in AI Recommender SystemsPersonalized recommendation systems power today’s e-commerce and streaming platforms, but they also raise regulatory concerns about user privacy. Under regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), individuals have the “right to be forgotten.” Whereas companies can remove user records from databases, it remains unclear whether trained AI models truly forget the behavioral patterns or preferences learned from that data. If not, platforms may continue profiling users even after deletion requests.This study introduces RecAudit, a practical auditing tool that tests whether a recommender system has genuinely removed a user’s influence from its trained model. RecAudit acts as an independent verification mechanism that identifies users whose behavioral traces persist after data deletion. Across multiple real-world data sets, RecAudit substantially outperforms existing auditing and membership inference methods.By enabling organizations to detect high-risk cases and target corrective machine unlearning efforts, RecAudit provides a concrete technical pathway to operationalize data revocation rights. The framework supports platform operators and regulators in strengthening accountability and ensuring AI systems comply with evolving data protection laws.

Balancing Efficiency and Safety: How and When Algorithmic Management Induces Gig Workers' Unsafe Behavior

2026-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Human Resource Management
As the gig economy expands, millions of food delivery riders rely on gig platforms for their livelihoods, yet this growth has also been accompanied by rising traffic violations and accidents, posing risks to both rider and public safety. It is therefore critical to understand not only the mechanisms driving gig workers' unsafe behavior but also the factors that may mitigate it. Drawing on goal conflict theory and the job demands–resources model, we examine the mediating role of performance–safety goal conflict in the relationship between algorithmic goal setting and unsafe behavior, and further test a dual‐stage moderated mediation model in which algorithmic monitoring and conscientiousness function as boundary conditions. To test our hypotheses, we conducted four interrelated studies using a multi‐method approach: Study 1 employed LLM‐based text analysis (N= 657), Study 2 adopted a video‐based scenario experiment (N= 140), Study 3 implemented a three‐wave survey (N= 242), and Study 4 incorporated objective behavioral data of unsafe behavior (N= 151). Across these studies, the findings consistently demonstrate that algorithmic goal setting intensifies gig workers' performance–safety goal conflict, which in turn increases unsafe behavior. Moreover, algorithmic monitoring amplifies the effect of algorithmic goal setting on performance–safety goal conflict, whereas conscientiousness serves as a critical personal resource that mitigates the impact of performance–safety goal conflict on unsafe behavior. This study advances existing research by revealing how algorithmic management contributes to gig workers' unsafe behavior and offers practical implications for reducing such risks through both the optimization of algorithmic systems and the cultivation of gig workers' conscientiousness.

Algorithmic trading and intra-industry information transfer

2026-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Accounting Studies
We examine the role of algorithmic trading in transmitting intra-industry information. Using a comprehensive U.S. sample, we find that algorithmic trading amplifies the stock price reactions of non-announcing firms to the earnings announcements of industry peers that report earlier in the same fiscal quarter. Further analyses reveal that sector exchange-traded funds serve as an important channel through which algorithmic trading facilitates the diffusion of industry information. Moreover, the effect of algorithmic trading strengthens when peers’ information is more relevant to the focal firm and of higher reporting quality. Finally, our evidence suggests that these effects reflect enhanced price discovery rather than temporary overreaction. Overall, our findings illuminate the informational role of algorithmic trading and its implications for market efficiency.

Sell-side analysts with accounting experience

2026-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Accounting Studies
This study documents the performance and career outcomes of sell-side analysts with prior accounting education or experience. Analysts with accounting work experience—especially former auditors—issue more accurate earnings forecasts and more profitable sell recommendations. In contrast, analysts with only accounting education or CPA credentials do not outperform. Former auditors also ask more accounting-focused questions during earnings calls, and the firms they cover exhibit higher earnings quality and more conservative reporting, consistent with improved monitoring. In terms of labor market outcomes, these analysts have longer tenures, are marginally more likely to attain all-star recognition, and are more often assigned to firms with complex financial reporting and greater analyst competition, suggesting strategic deployment. Overall, our findings highlight the value—but also the limits—of accounting expertise in sell-side research, particularly as it relates to information processing, capital market intermediation, and professional advancement.

Why are reported fair values sticky?

2026-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Review of Accounting Studies
We analyze how incentives affect the reporting of fair values using mutual funds’ valuations of Level 3 equity holdings. We conjecture that the observed stickiness of reported values arises because funds defer revaluation until they can make a sufficiently compelling and objective case to avoid costly accusations of aggressive valuation. Consistent with our conjecture, we find that funds’ revaluations of the same security are clustered in time and tightly distributed, and revaluations of non-traded securities are more likely when market returns are larger and the source of those returns is less subjective. In addition, consistent with a greater concern for overvaluation, we document that funds are more likely to reduce valuations of these holdings when market returns are negative. Finally, given the stickiness of valuations, we provide evidence that funds exploit valuation discretion to improve performance rankings through the timing of revaluations rather than through the levels of new values.

EXPRESS: Turbocharging the Competitor: Unintended Spillovers of Personnel On-road Insurance Implementation in Ride-sourcing Industry

2026-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
In response to social protests, transportation network companies introduced incentive programs to improve hourly utilization and retain drivers. While such initiatives assume increased driver commitment, their impact on labor allocation across competing gig economy platforms remains unexplored. This study uses a quasi-experimental design and analyzes 20 weeks of data comprising over 75 million trips to examine spill-over effects of an East Asian platform’s comprehensive personnel on-road insurance (PI) policy on a competitor platform. The research uncovers significant changes in labor allocation patterns by identifying multi-homing and dedicated drivers through license plate matches. A difference-in-difference analysis provides evidence of cross-platform spillovers of PI: multi-homing drivers allocated 16.4% more hours to food delivery and reduced ride-hailing hours by 10.69% on thecompetitorplatform, while dedicated drivers reduced food-delivery hours by 34.6% but added 12.81% more ride-hailing hours. These shifts in hours corresponded to changes in earnings. To explore the mechanisms of such spill-over effects, the study observes multi-homing drivers’ labor allocation patterns on theimplementingplatform: Multi-homing drivers shifted toward food delivery, increasing hours by 17.3% and decreasing ride-hailing hours by 11.2% on the platform. The study further links such cross-platform shifts in drivers’ labor allocation by estimating job aggregation among multi-homing drivers and provides multiple robustness analyses to validate these effects. The study highlights the interconnectedness of gig economy stakeholders by empirically linking policy changes on one platform to cross-platform labor dynamics. Practical insights are provided on how the PI policy influenced platform utilization, driver behavior, and productivity, emphasizing that gig-economy platforms operate within a highly interdependent ecosystem rather than in isolation.

EXPRESS: The Negative Spillover Effect of Electronic Prescribing for Controlled Substances on the Opioid Epidemic

2026-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
The opioid epidemic poses widespread societal challenges. In response, electronic prescribing for controlled substances (EPCS), which requires prescribers to use the e-prescribing system, has begun attracting attention to combat the opioid epidemic by helping prescribers detect doctor shoppers and prevent forged prescriptions. However, a concern is that limited access to opioids after EPCS mandates may cause drug users to cross borders and travel to other areas without EPCS. Grounded in the tension on the efficacy of EPCS, this study aims to assess the impact of EPCS on the opioid dispensing rate. Leveraging a US county-level data set from 2010 to 2020 and employing a quasi-experiment setup with matching, we find that counties without an EPCS mandate but adjacent to a state with an EPCS mandate experience an increase in opioid dispensing rates. Specifically, a neighboring-state EPCS mandate is associated with a 7.56% increase in the opioid dispensing rate in an adjacent county on average. The findings reveal that the negative spillover effect spreads deeper in areas with lenient illicit drug controls, in urban regions, and in areas with high poverty levels. Moreover, we estimate the overall efficacy of EPCS mandates by combining both the positive direct effect and the negative spillover effect of EPCS. We discuss theoretical and policy insights for the effective operation of EPCS mandates.

EXPRESS: Why Full Refunds Prevail: A Product Fit Perspective

2026-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
This paper studies how an online seller designs a menu of return contracts to manage consumer heterogeneity arising from product misfit risk. In the model, informed consumers know the product fits, whereas uninformed consumers face uncertainty about fit. We show that when only misfit risk exists, a single full-refund contract can implement the optimal menu. The return price insures consumers against misfit, and the selling price extracts full surplus. This finding aligns with the widespread adoption of lenient return policies and demonstrates that uniform contracts can emerge endogenously from incentive compatibility rather than as ad hoc assumptions. Introducing quality risk—an additional source of uncertainty in the valuation of fit products—fundamentally changes this outcome. The seller then shifts from full to partial refunds. Under high quality risk, the optimal menu becomes differentiated: a low-price, no-frills option for informed consumers and a high-price, insurance-heavy option for uninformed consumers. To induce self-selection, the seller distorts the return price upward for uninformed consumers to strengthen the insurance effect, trading off allocative efficiency for screening. Interestingly, when quality risk becomes extreme, refunds not only mitigate information rents but also enhance social surplus by preventing consumers from retaining low-quality products. Extensions incorporating misfit valuation, seller-side costs, and return hassle costs show that the uniform contract remains robust when only misfit risk is present, rationalizing diverse return policy practices in online markets.

EXPRESS: Empowering Supply Chain Energy Efficiency: Merits and Pitfalls of Buyer Collaboration

2026-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Production and Operations Management
Government environmental agencies are increasingly partnering with large, foreign corporate buyers in the energy efficiency improvement process to encourage investments at small manufacturers that can enhance the value of local manufacturing. Using a stylized supply chain model, we show that while buyer collaboration enhances energy efficiency investments, its impact on the value of local manufacturing varies. Specifically, buyer collaboration improves the value of local manufacturing only when both the cost of the buyer’s outside sourcing option and the environmental impact of energy are either high or low. In cases where one factor is high and the other is low, buyer collaboration reduces the value of local manufacturing. Moreover, we find that the higher penetration of renewable sources in the energy mix can either amplify or mitigate the beneficial impact of buyer collaboration. When the manufacturer is more competitive in the global market, a greener energy mix can negate the beneficial impacts of buyer collaboration on the value of local manufacturing. Our study provides valuable insights for designing environmental initiatives and policies to boost both energy efficiency and local manufacturing, underscoring the importance of supply chain interactions in synchronizing climate change policies.

Does Offshoring Production Reduce Innovation? Firm-Level Evidence from Taiwan

2026-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Management Science
Does the offshoring of production degrade or enhance the innovative capabilities of manufacturing firms? We contribute to this debate with causal evidence that offshoring impacts both the level and nature of innovation. Exploiting a policy shock that differentially affected the ability of Taiwanese firms to offshore production of certain goods to China, we find a decline in innovation levels and a shift from product to process innovation in the technologies directly related to product categories that could be offshored more easily after the policy shock. However, we also find evidence that the policy shock led to a reallocation of research effort within the firm, raising innovative effort in product categories not directly impacted by the shock and shifting them toward product innovation.This paper was accepted by Alfonso Gambardella, business strategy.Funding: This work was supported by the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the National Science Foundation [Grant 1360170] and the Portuguese National Science Foundation.Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04944 .

EXPRESS: When Consumer Betrayal Spreads: Transmission and Compounding Effects in High-Stakes Situations

2026-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Journal of Marketing
Betrayal is a harmful phenomenon that damages relationships and imposes significant psychological and financial costs. This research examines consumer experiences of multiple betrayals by multiple actors in high-stakes situations, where the consequences for consumers are exceptionally devastating. Drawing on the lived experiences of the bereaved during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study finds that consumers perceive betrayal as originating from five interrelated levels. These betrayals often influence and facilitate other betrayals, a dynamic referred to as transmission effects in which acts of betrayal propagate across and between levels. Results reveal that the depth and breadth of betrayal often transcend isolated brand incidents, and that multiple betrayals create a compounding effect where consumers spread the net of blame to include not just individual organizations but also the systems that govern them, and even broader societal structures. The research also spotlights the severe impact of betrayal on consumer wellbeing in the form of moral injury. By expanding the scope and implications of consumer betrayal, this paper offers both theoretical and managerial contributions by deepening our understanding of how betrayal occurs, its effects on consumers, and how marketers might work to prevent or mitigate it.

The impact of workers' compensation laws on entrepreneurial activity

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal
Government policy that aims to stimulate business activity often overlooks its indirect impacts on entrepreneurial entry. In particular, the role of free time, especially in concert with liquidity constraints, remains an underexplored factor. In this paper, we exploit two exogenous shocks to workers' free time to furnish plausibly causal effects on entrepreneurial activity: (random) injury and the 2011 amendments to the Illinois workers' compensation laws. Utilizing a two‐way fixed effects estimation, we find that as workers' compensation becomes less generous, that is, by limiting both financial resources and an employee's time away from work, entrepreneurial activity within a specific geographical region is significantly reduced. Thus, we provide evidence of an unintended and negative impact on entrepreneurial activity caused by an indirect policy change. Further, this result unduly affects the recently injured or otherwise disabled. Our results are robust to alternative specifications and data sources, suggesting an important incidence of compensatory insurance regulation on entrepreneurial activity and, as a result, important considerations for future policymaking.Managerial SummaryWorkers' compensation is a state‐level program that provides replacement wages to workers injured on the job. In 2011, amendments to Illinois' workers' compensation laws made this program less generous in terms of both financial benefits and time out of work. We study the impact of these amendments on entrepreneurial activity. We find that less generous workers' compensation has a large adverse effect on entrepreneurial activity because it constrains two important factors required for experimentation with entrepreneurship: financial resources and time. Our results hold up to several statistical models and controls, including local innovative and high‐tech firms, as well as alternative datasets. Our findings yield important insights for policymakers in other states drafting such regulations and for researchers studying the incidence of such policies.

Real Credit Cycles

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

American Economic Review
We embed diagnostic expectations in a workhorse neoclassical model with heterogeneous firms and risky debt. A realistic degree of overreaction estimated from US firms’ earnings forecasts generates realistic credit cycles. Good times produce economic and financial fragility, predicting future disappointment of expectations, low bond returns, and investment declines. To generate the size of spread increases observed during 2007–2009, the model requires only moderate negative shocks. Diagnostic expectations offer a realistic, parsimonious way to produce financial reversals in business cycle models. (JEL D84, E13, E22, E32, E44, G12, G32)

Robust Misspecified Models

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

American Economic Review
This paper studies which misspecified models are likely to persist when decision-makers compare them with competing models. The main result characterizes such models based on two features that can be derived from primitives: The model’s asymptotic accuracy in predicting the equilibrium distribution of observed outcomes and the “tightness” of the prior around such equilibria. Misspecified models can be robust, persisting against any arbitrary competing model—including the true model—despite decision-makers observing an infinite amount of data. Moreover, simple misspecified models equipped with entrenched priors can be more robust than complex correctly specified models. (JEL C11, C52, D11, L82)

Games on Multiplex Networks

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

American Economic Review
We develop a simple multilayer network model in which agents allocate effort across layers with heterogeneous structures, subject to an aggregate effort constraint. Incentives are shaped by agents’ network positions within each layer, and equilibrium behavior reflects both within- and cross-layer interactions. We analyze how shocks propagate through the network and characterize optimal targeting interventions. Our results show that effective policy design must account for effort allocation across layers. We also demonstrate that predictions from monolayer models can diverge sharply from those of multilayer models, underscoring the importance of accounting for network complexity in both empirical and policy analyses. (JEL C70, D78, D82, D85, H41, Z13)

Abundance from Abroad: Migrant Income and Long-Run Economic Development

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

American Economic Review
We study how international migrant income prospects affect long-run development in origin areas. We leverage the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis exchange rate shocks in a shift-share identification strategy across Philippine provinces. Initial migrant income shocks are magnified six-fold over time, increasing domestic income, education levels, migrant skills, and high-skilled migration. Remarkably, 74.9 percent of long-run income gains come from domestic rather than migrant income. Trade driven impacts of exchange rate shocks are orthogonal to effects via migrant income. A structural model reveals that 19.7 percent of long-run income gains stem from educational investments. International migration fosters broad economic development in origin communities. (JEL F22, F31, G01, J24, J82, O15, O16)

Making Bricks from Straw: Resources and Productivity in Health Care

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

American Economic Review
Why do health facilities in developing countries do so poorly? This paper examines the role of financial constraints. I describe an experiment in which we surprised health workers in randomly selected public health clinics in Nigeria with a ₦600,000 grant paid out in installments over one year. Its administration was left entirely to health workers. The award led to large productivity gains. Using expenditure data combined with novel textual data, I provide an explanation for these effects. I show the award increased investments in physical and human capital, led to lower prices for patients, and inspired health workers to do better. (JEL D24, G31, H75, I11, J24, J31, O15)

Similarity of Information and Collective Action

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

American Economic Review
We study a canonical collective action game with incomplete information. Individuals attempt to coordinate to achieve a shared goal, while also facing a temptation to free-ride. More similar information can help them coordinate, but it can also exacerbate free-riding. Our main result shows that more similar information facilitates (impedes) achieving the common goal when it is sufficiently challenging (easy). We apply this insight to show why less powerful authoritarian governments may face larger protests if they restrict press freedom, when committee diversity is beneficial in costly voting, and when a more diverse community contributes more to public good provision. (JEL C71, D71, D72, D81, D82, D83, H41)

Spillovers in State Capacity Building: Evidence from the Digitization of Land Records in Pakistan

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

American Economic Review
Digitization reforms have been hailed as an effective way of strengthening state capacity. However, digitization can also fundamentally reshape the organization of bureaucracies. Using a unique administrative dataset on agricultural taxation and surveys of local bureaucrats from Punjab, Pakistan, we show that digitization reforms can have unintended consequences for state capacity. We exploit the staggered rollout of the digitization of land records in Punjab to show that digitization had a negative effect on tax collection. The fall in taxes was not due to a decrease in the tax base. Instead, digitization affected the bureaucrats’ capacity to collect taxes. (JEL D73, H11, H71, O12, O17)

Negative Control Falsification Tests for Instrumental Variable Designs

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

American Economic Review
The validity of instrumental variable (IV) designs is typically tested using two types of falsification tests. We characterize these tests as conditional independence tests between negative control variables—proxies for unobserved variables posing a threat to the identification—and the IV or the outcome. We describe the conditions variables must satisfy in order to serve as negative controls. We show these falsification tests examine not only independence and the exclusion restriction but also functional form assumptions. Our analysis reveals conventional applications of these tests may flag problems even in valid IV designs. We offer implementation guidance to address these issues. (JEL C12, C18, C26, C52)

A Long and a Short Leg Make for a Wobbly Equilibrium

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

American Economic Review
We provide a model to explain how the interaction between the spot and lending markets for stocks can lead to abrupt changes in short selling activity. Furthermore, rational short sellers may choose to abandon the market even as mispricing widens. We document empirically that the dynamics of short selling are fat tailed and subject to abrupt changes, especially for the stocks that the model identifies as susceptible to such dynamics. (JEL G11, G12, G14, G41)

Market Power and Capital Constraints

2026-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

American Economic Review
We explore how traders’ equity capitalization influences asset prices in a framework that accounts for market power. In our model, traders with capital constraints engage in transactions in an imperfectly competitive market. We demonstrate that looser capital constraints elevate both asset prices and price impact, the latter diminishing market liquidity. Using Canadian Treasury auction data, we illustrate how to apply our model to quantify these effects. We estimate the shadow costs of capital constraints by leveraging a temporary policy exemption during 2020–2021. We show that while these constraints are only infrequently binding, their relative impact when activated can be sizable. (JEL E63, G12, G14, G23, G41, L13)